Formatting external hard drive to use with PS3

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Level 1

8 points

Formatting external hard drive to use with PS3

Hi,

I have recently bought a Seagate 500GB desktop external hard drive and want to link it up with my PS3. My Macbook recognises it and allows me to add files to it, however, when I plug into my Playstation it is not recognised.

I have read in various forums that this problem can be solved in Windows by converting the HDD to a FAT32 format, to do this on a Mac however, is seemingly a lot more difficult.

Has anyone had a similar problem to this and how have you fixed it? I have read that there is software that can be downloaded to convert it to the correct format but do not know what this software is.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Tom

Posted on Oct 16, 2008 1:55 AM

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Answer 1

Benny Li

Level 4

3,570 points

Oct 29, 2008 5:32 PM in response to tomscott84

I had trouble getting my external hard drive to be recognized in PS3 XMB until I realized Disk Utility was using Apple Partition Map to prepare my hard drive. Setting it back to Master Boot Record did the trick.

Hope this helps.

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Answer 2

Axel Foley

Level 10

150,972 points

Oct 16, 2008 7:11 PM in response to tomscott84

TomScott84::

1, Open *Disk Utility* in Leopard
2. On the Left pane select the drive you want to format (In your case the external drive)
3. On the right Select either the Erase or the Partition tab if you want to partition your drive
4. In the Volume Format section select *MS-DOS (FAT)*
5. Click Erase

Your HD volume will now be formatted to FAT32.

Axel F.

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Answer 3

Axel Foley

Level 10

150,972 points

Oct 16, 2008 4:48 AM in response to tomscott84

I have done this for my PS3.
Have a Western Digital 500GB HD. Used Disk Utility from OSx (Leopard) and formatted the drive to FAT32.

Axel F.

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Answer 4

tomscott84 Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 16, 2008 7:43 AM in response to Axel Foley

Thanks Axel, how did you manage to do this though as I don't seem to have a FAT32 option on Disk Manager? Got a MacBook which I bought from new 5 months ago so should be as up to date as possible??

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