Whew, what a mouthful. You might possibly find this post if you’re trying to backup your PS3 – it’s easy, Sony says you just need your drive to be FAT32 – well that’s fine, my thumb drive is FAT32. Oh… it needs to be able to fit the entire system for a backup? Ok – I’ll just take this external 40gig drive I have and format it. No option when right clicking the drive and choosing format for FAT32 only extFAT and NTFS, well maybe extFAT will work… nope! OK, well let me try the command line: format /FS:FAT32 /q f: – nope, drive too big?

Apparently Microsoft has imposed a 32G artificial limit on what Win7 will do for a format. That got me hunting. Apparently you either need Windows XP or a third party utility. Thankfully this is a nice little program that will make quick work of your formatting needs. My PS3 is currently backing up after an entire night of stupid.

So check out FAT32Format by Tom Thornhill and throw him some bucks via PayPal if you find it useful.