Formatting large external hard disks - FAT32

Prompted by a message in a forum, I've tried connecting external hard disks to my Sony Bravia TV, instead of using USB sticks.

The good news is that I've successfully got it to work with the two disks I tried (20gb and 80gb), though it's not as straightforward as it could be.

If you plug an external hard disk into a Sony Bravia TV, it needs to be FAT or FAT32 format.  The chances are, if it's been used with a Windows machine, it'll be NTFS.

If you try to reformat the hard disk using Windows, it won't give you the option of using FAT or FAT32.  If you're given the option of exFAT, forget it - the Sony Bravia doesn't support this, which is a shame.

The reasons are logical - FAT & FAT32 are dreadfully inefficient on larger disks, wasting lots of space, so Microsoft have imposed an artificial limit of around 32Gb on FAT32 formatting.  However, FAT32, in theory, can support up to 2Tb.

(If you're thinking "ah, I'll nip to the command prompt and use FORMAT F: /FS:FAT32" - forget it.  It'll take ages, appear to be working, but right at the end, tell you it can't do it.  I tried)

So, to get an external hard disk to work with a Sony Bravia, you need to be a bit cunning.

Plug the disk into a PC, open up Windows Explorer, right click on the drive letter and choose "properties" - it'll tell you in there if the external drive is FAT, FAT32, NTFS or some other format.

If you want to reformat it to FAT32, you'll probably have difficulty doing this under Windows.  Right click on the drive in Explorer, and choose format. If you can select "FAT32" under "File System" in the format dialog box, great - go for it.  I suspect it won't appear. ("exFAT" won't help you - the Sony doesn't support this format)

You'll need an additional piece of software that will let you format larger disks with FAT32.  Go here :

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat.htm

And click on the picture of the program, it'll download a little program, save it somewhere useful and run it.

This software is Freeware, but if you find it useful I urge you to click on the Paypal button and donate something to the author.

Make sure you select the correct disk drive! YOU WILL LOSE ALL DATA ON THE DISK THAT YOU FORMAT!

It's very quick (if you choose quick format option).  You can then copy your media files to the hard disk and your Bravia should play them.

I've tested two hard disks - an old 20Gb disk connected via an IDE to USB adaptor, and a slightly less old 80Gb disk, also connected in the same way.  Both work with no problems on my Bravia KDL-32EX403, providing that the files I try to play are in a format the Bravia is happy with (see my earlier post about remuxing to .M2TS)

Hope this helps.