PS3 won't read my 2 TB FAT32 external hdd

N

NoSoul

Member
I just spent a day and a half transferring about 1.5 TB of games and converting them to ISO thinking everything was fine because I formatted to FAT32 which is what I'm supposed to. But when I put the external in my PS3 it doesn't read it.
 
The PS3 does not read the external drive at all - as in, it is not detected on the Photo, Music & Video XMB columns? If this is the case, then it's possible you have the drive partitioned as GPT when MBR is required for the PS3 to read it.
 
Yeah I just remembered that and I was able to change GPT to MBR in Minitool Partition Wizard and I didn't lose any data. However I put it in the PS3 and it's still not being read.

Is it because I made two partitions one FAT32 one NTFS? I wanted to backup my internal PS2 games on the NTFS. I made about 1.5 TB FAT32 and about 500 GB NTFS they show are two different hard drives on Windows. Both are primary not logical.

Also yes that's correct I don't see it in music videos or photos. Managunz reads the ntfs portion, but nothing reads the FAT32.
 
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It doesn't work, I made a bunch of ISOs and the original hard drive has corruption so I just formatted the original hard drive that had all the games properly to mbr fat32 primary having to copy everything about 1.5 tb to it, then when that's done I'll reformat the one i just got and copy everything back this time with only one partition because I'm not risking that again. Just going to set me back a day or two but oh well.

I dont think theres anything else I could have done because I read in another thread

1) your Partitions has to be MBR (2 TB file limit) and not GPT
2) Your Fat32 Partition has to be first then the ntfs Partition (as second)
3) both Partitions Fat32 + NTFS has to be formatted primary and not logical!)
you can use Ease us Partition Master or any other Pc Tool that will allow to do this steps

And I did all those things although maybe because I changed it from GPT to MBR it's not being read idk but it wouldn't read it.
 
If the NTFS partition is being read by ManaGunZ then it's properly partitioned. The problem seems to be the FAT32 partition which the litmus test being whether or not it is detected on the XMB. I'm not sure what you could do, but maybe someone else will be able to advise on if/how you could redeem PS3 access to the FAT32 partition without having to format the entire drive.

I have a 2TB external HDD with both a FAT32 and NTFS partition, and have no problems whatsoever. I too store my PS2 ISOs on the NTFS drive when I want to free up some space on the (stock 160GB) internal drive. So, it is very possible to get the PS3 to read both FAT32 and NTFS on the same drive.

Again, I'd hold off until someone else can offer their opinion, as I'm not sure what the best solution would be and I hesitate to suggest formatting the drive as that may be totally unnecessary.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help, but I'm just not too sure myself on what's best to do in this scenario.
 
No worries, all I'm doing is I just formatted the original hard drive that had all my games and I'm just copying everything back to it from the new one that can't be read by the PS3 but of course I can cancel it at any time and try whatever someone suggests. Yeah the part of the post I posted with the 3 steps were someone trying to do the same thing with FAT32 and NTFS and they were telling them how to do it so it's possible I don't know why the PS3 won't read mine. The only thing I can think of is I had formatted it to GPT first by mistake and maybe changing it to MBR is not working despite the fact that it now says it's indeed MBR in Minitool partition wizard.
 
You could possibly try/have tried MiniTool Partition Wizard - I seem to remember reading that the Free version still allows MBR<-->GPT conversion. I've definitely seen it recommended in a number of threads over time. Might be worth a try.

Edit: Sorry, I didn't see you'd already tried MiniTool. It's a bit of a mystery to me, then. :confused:
 
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Yeah that's what I used even in the first place to format the drive. But I forgot it defaults to GPT and you have to change it MBR before you apply the format, I just forgot all about the GPT/MBR stuff since it's been like 4 years since I changed hard drives.
 
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