How to Format FAT32 with Vista

Many components such as karaoke players, Blu-ray players, PlayStation3, etc. require hard drives or flash memories formatted for FAT32 however Windows Vista won't allow you to format a hard drive or hard drive partition greater than 32 GB.  You can go with a flash but if you have an old hard drive that too small for today's back-up (like with video back-ups) you can make those hard drives work.  Some sites say just use the DOS command "format /FS:FAT32 x:" were "x" is the drive but that doesn't work  with my Vista SP2. Here is the procedure:

1. Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management
2. From an unformatted hard drive, right click the hard drive and select "New Simple Volume and follow the menu to format it.

3.After it is formatted, right click again and select "Shrink Volume" again.

4.  Select 32000, if you go larger you won't get the FAT32 option.

5. When that's done, make the FAT32 a partition by right clicking and selecting "New Simple Volume".

6. Keep the 3200.

7. Select the letter you want for the partitian.

8. Select FAT32.

9. Finish with partitian.

10.  Now you need to go back and right click the partition formatted for NTFS and delete it.  Yeah it's wasted but if you don't delete it you karaoke, Blu-ray or Xbox won't recognize it.

11.  Select "Yes", make very very sure that you have the correct drive and partition selected.

12.  It should end up looking like this:

No pathinfo