[SOLVED] Is it not possible to format a drive larger than 2TB as FAT32?

[charlesstricklin]

I have a 3TB Western Digital Green drive that I would like to format as FAT32, but despite everything I read or see on the Internet, despite formatting as Admin from the command line or using several partitioning utilities, I am unable to format the drive larger than 2TB. I'm using Windows 7, if that matters.

 

[Eximo]

Possibly, but not the standard formatting that Windows will do.

You might have to increase the cluster size. This will have a negative impact though. if you have a 1KB file it will take up a whole cluster, which to do 4TB would be 64KB per cluster?

Is exFAT an option for you?

Interestingly, Microsoft doesn't even list what you've already achieved as possible:

Default cluster sizes for FAT32
The following table describes the default cluster sizes for FAT32.

Volume size	Windows NT 3.51	Windows NT 4.0	Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Windows 2000
7 MB–16MB	Not supported	Not supported	Not supported
16 MB–32 MB	512 bytes	512 bytes	Not supported
32 MB–64 MB	512 bytes	512 bytes	512 bytes
64 MB–128 MB	1 KB	1 KB	1 KB
128 MB–256 MB	2 KB	2 KB	2 KB
256 MB–8GB	4 KB	4 KB	4 KB
8GB–16GB	8 KB	8 KB	8 KB
16GB–32GB	16 KB	16 KB	16 KB
32GB–2TB	32 KB	Not supported	Not supported
> 2TB	Not supported	Not supported	Not supported