Unfortunately the industry standard for formatting not just external hard drives but Internal HDDS and large(I will explain why later) USB Memory Sticks is NTFS (New Technology File System). This has to be the case nowadays because there is a size limit that windows can only deal with when formatting to FAT32 (File Allocation Table 32). The limit that windows can handle when formatting a drive to FAT32 is 32GB and you will be hard pressed to find an external drive smaller than that in the shops these days. Of course you can still find memory sticks smaller that that and most of these will come with FAT32 as standard but in reality you will not be using a memory stick for saving games or TV programmes because of their limited size.

It’s in the external hard drive area that the problem really is. When you plug your new drive into your laptop or PC, open up my computer and right click to see it’s properties. I can almost guarantee you that it will say NTFS file system. This is fine when using it as a back up device with your PC but not so when connected to gaming consoles or satellite receivers with PVR functionality.

You need the drive to be FAT32. If you simply try to format it in windows using the right click/format method, it will fail and if you do it from the cmd prompt it is even worse because it takes hours and will still fail anyway.

Save yourself the time and trouble and just go to a website like download dot com and search for a small program like CompuApps Swissknife. Once downloaded and installed. Follow the following instructions. Make sure you have save anything you want from the drive before you do this.

Open CompuApps Swissknife and Click on USB Host Adaptor. It will be fairly obvious which host adaptor is the correct one as the details will change on the right hand side of the screen tom match the external hard drive you have inserted in to the PC. Next click on Partition and Quick Format. Highlight the desired drive and click delete. This will wipe your drive completely and leave it in its raw state. This will only take a few seconds and after that you want to make sure that you have all the options selected correctly. You’ll want to make the Partition type a Primary Drive, the format type is Hard Disk Format and file system is FAT32. Don’t make the drive an active partition and change the volume labe to whatever you want as this is only the name of the drive. Finally you click on Create. This will be very quick and once completyed, your external hard drive will now be formatted to FAT32.