What is FAT or FAT 32? and how do I format a drive to it?

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jakethesnake

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#66145 13-Aug-2010 10:12

Hi, this may seem a simple question, but after searching the macs inbuilt "help" gives no answer and no mention of FAT/32. I have a new tv that can have a usb drive plugged into it to copy to and play from, but the tv manual states it only recognises FAT or FAT 32 drives. What the heck is that? I have a 1TB seagate external drive I have been using for my macs storage, formatted on my mac 10.4 osx system, can I reformat it using disk utility to FAT? My Disk Utility only lists mac formats and Dos and Unix. Do I choose Dos or Unix to format as fat or fat 32, and which is the better fat or 32?

thanks

chiefie

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#367063 13-Aug-2010 10:30

In Mac OS X, 'DOS' format is referred to as either FAT or FAT32, depending on the capacity, it will automatically format it to the right filesystem. 'UNIX' is obviously, Unix.

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wellygary

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#367064 13-Aug-2010 10:30

FAT is "file allocation table" it is a disk format used by DOS, ( and earlier versions of windows)

In Disk utility select DOS, and it should format the disk as FAT 32,
But FAT32 has a number of limitation such as only allowing file sizes of less that 4GB,

jakethesnake

12 posts

Geek

#367075 13-Aug-2010 10:47

thanks guys. I had it wrong anyway, seems the page i read in the manual was referring to USB "flash" drives meaning the USB stick things needing formatting to FAT format, and upon further reading it appears if I plug the 1TB USB "hard disk" into the tv's usb port, it would go ahead and format it and have it done in such a way as to tie it in registered to the tv for solely its own use. Not sure if I'm completely happy about it that way, but it does enable me to record tv programmes to the hard disk, and record and watch/playback live (like mysky I guess), and I guess if I need it again I could reformat it for the mac at a later stage, A bummer I can't use it for both at once. Maybe if I could partition the drive it might work for both the telly and mac?

chiefie

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#367076 13-Aug-2010 10:49

Most appliances only look at single and first primary partition. Also, I don't think you can record off to it from MySky either.

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jakethesnake

12 posts

Geek

#367081 13-Aug-2010 10:59

Ok, I'll try partitioning it on the mac, then copy some things to the mac side of it, and plug it into the telly usb port and see if it formats just the first partition or the whole drive. Cheers, its worth a go.
Re "mysky" I only meant it appears to have a similar function to that, in that it states it can record continuously to HDD and let the user go back or pause live recordings. I assume this is what mysky does in its box.
thanks for your help, it's appreciated.

marpada

476 posts

Ultimate Geek

#367338 13-Aug-2010 19:48

FAT32 has a limit of 4Gb for the maximum file size, what may be quite annoying