Open a command window by going to Start, then Run and typing in CMD.
Now type in the following command at the prompt:
format /FS:FAT32 X:
Replace the letter X with the letter of your external hard drive in Windows. Windows will go ahead and begin formatting the drive in FAT32!
There seems to also be an issue when using the command line besides the size limit problem. Namely, it can take forever to format the hard drive for some users. Not sure why, but I’ve seen it enough times and it can be very frustrating to wait 5 hours and then have the whole format fail. If the format is taking longer than an hour, just cancel it.
Windows cannot format drives and partitions larger than 32GB in FAT32. Certainly, you can use the DOS command prompt to format drives and partitions beyond 1TB. But if you have a drive that is 1TB or larger, you may still fail using the DOS command prompt to format and get an error saying “The volume is too big for FAT32”.
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