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December 14, 2013
Reformatting Lacie External Hard Drive w/ FAT32
My LaCie 1TB external hard drive is formatted as NTFS. So, with the MacBook Air, all I can do is read from it. I'm not able to write to it. So, I decided to reformat it as FAT32 so that I can write to it from Windows and from the MacBook Air.
Because it's only a 1TB drive, I should be able to format it from the DOS command prompt. This website says I should used the following command:
format G: /FS:FAT32
So, here goes nothing...
C:\Documents and Settings\Rob>format G: /FS:FAT32
The type of the file system is NTFS.
The new file system is FAT32.
Enter current volume label for drive G: Lacie
WARNING, ALL DATA ON NON-REMOVABLE DISK
DRIVE G: WILL BE LOST!
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? Y
Verifying 953867M
Format cannot run because the volume is in use by another
process. Format may run if this volume is dismounted first.
ALL OPENED HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID.
Would you like to force a dismount on this volume? (Y/N) Y
Volume dismounted. All opened handles to this volume are now invalid.
0 percent completed.
It looks like it's working...it takes about 2 minutes to process 1% of the drive, so I figure it will take about 200 minutes, or about 3 hrs and 20 minutes, roughly, to reformat the drive to FAT32.
Ran from roughly 8:44 pm to 12:44 am so, about 4 hours. Then, I got this message:
The volume is too big for FAT32.
Great. Now, I'll try to format it using the Verbatim FAT32 Tool:
Wow...that was easy. So...that appears to have worked.
Basically, I downloaded the zip filesmdk_fat322.zip.
It contained a single executable named SmartDisk_FAT32_tool.exe.
I double-clicked the executable, and it ran.
At the top, it says "Please select the drive you wish to format from the list below" and it listed the drive I wanted to format (in this case, the G: drive).
The only thing I really did of any consequence was change the volume label from 'Default' to 'LACIE'.
Then, I clicked the 'Format Drive' button.
It ran for about 60 seconds and said "The drive has been successfully formatted."
I clicked 'Exit".
Posted by Rob Kiser on December 14, 2013 at 8:32 PM
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