Help

[Damonkey]

First of all i'm a bit of a noob with things like this so if its obvious forgive me. I just bought an external hard drive. I decided to upload some photos and videos to my ps3. However the hard drive is not fat-32 its NTFS so can i switch over, so i can upload without losing all my data? Any advice is appreciated. Hard drive model is Iomega LPHD-UP
Thxs Damonkey.

 

[Jazende]

You can't change filesystem and keep files on em, you'll have to back them up on another place temporarly. There's not really anything wrong with NTFS though.

If you're truely desperate and there's still more than half room left on the disk you can theoreticly partition it, make the second the correct FS and place em on there, then reformat the other partition when it's empty.

 

[Damonkey]

Ye NTFS is fine but for some reason PS3's will only let you update from fat-32. I trawled through some forums and seems i will need to buy a usb stick and do it that way

 

[Atermors]

There are FS you can downgrade but NTFS and Fat-{16,32} aren't among them. (You could upgrade Fat to NTFS)
If its just for updates of your PS3 try resizing the large NTFS Partition to something like Size-500MB and format the created 500MB to Fat32. Don't use Fat32 for large devices it's horribly slow on them, its fine for small devices though.
Don't really know good partition software for Windows, if you got a linux live cd use gparted for it.

 

[Croga]

Long answer:

The PS3 won't accept your NTFS drive because NTFS is licensed by Microsoft and Sony doesn't want to pay for a license. Most likely they don't want to take the time to build an NTFS driver for their system either. Because of the way files are stored on a harddrive (FAT uses, as the acronym says, a single table to allocate the space for the files, NTFS is more dynamic in this), FAT will be slower when you have a large number of files on a disk. This information doesn't help at all though as the PS3 will still not accept an NTFS drive
Although there are tools to repartition a drive and make the unused space into a separate FAT32 partition, all of those tools are notoriously dangerous and may (in a significant number of cases!) destroy the data you have on it. My advice would be to simply backup all of those files and reformat the drive completely. This may, however, be a challenge as most Windows versions don't allow you to format a FAT partition if it's over a certain size.

Short answer:
Backup your files and re-format the drive. You may need to use the DOS command for this:
format /FS:FAT32 X:
(where X: is the drive name)

 

[Atermors]

It isn't really dangerous as long as the partition is properly defragmented and you take the space at the end of the device. (Even without I didn't have any problems with ntfsresize) Just for upgrading purposes crippling the hole device is a bit overkill

 

[Croga]

mwah..... "crippling" is a bit over the top mate........ FAT32 tends to lose performance when there are very large numbers of files in a folder (5000+) and it doesn't support files over 4GB (minus 2 bytes). In all other situations it tends to perform slightly better then NTFS because it doesn't have to check all the security crap.
FAT32 is generally okay for external drives as long as you don't go stuffing folders full of files. If your folder structure is maintained decently you'll never notice any performance issues.

 

[apple13140]

NTFS can not be supported by PS3, what we should do is convert NTFS to FAT32. I’d like to suggest you convert NTFS to FAT32 without data losing through NTFS to FAT32 Converter. It is especially designed for converting the file system from NTFS to FAT32.