Verified answer

It will erase everything so you need to move your stuff to a different drive Before you format. Also keep in mind you will be unable to store anything sized over 4gb (4,294,967,296 bytes technically). So most any HD stuff and some programs will not fit. However if you legally own the films you can always go to demonoid or the pirate bay and search for 1080p m2ts files by ps3-team, coopsuk, platoonhd, among others

ok so All you have to do is open up the command prompt and issue the following command:

format drive /fs:fat32

Substitute the word "drive" with the drive letter of the drive you want to format into a FAT32 volume. After answering a few confirmation questions, Windows will start to format your large disk to FAT32; no special program needed. :-)

Anything plugged into the PS3 (USB flash drive, external HDD, and other external mass storage devices) MUST be formatted to FAT32 for the PS3 to know what it is. You can format it from your computer. However, there is a draw back to this if your using Windows. Windows has a GB limit on what it can format. It can't format anything larger than 30 something GB. Anything less it can. So if you have something larger than that, you would have to pay someone to get it formatted for you unless you know someone who doesn't use windows to format it for you.

As for your music/movies, I'm not entirely sure. What I would do is put the music/movies onto a computer (all of it, to keep it safe temporarily), format the external HDD to FAT32, then put all that back onto the external HDD. Easy as that. It will still work with computers and laptops and such just fine once its formatted to FAT32. If you have something that's 1TB, because its so big they have to format it into 3 separate drives within the one. Each will be 320GB, so it's all good (I have a 1TB = 1024GB external HDD and they had to separate it into the 3 320GB sections so I know from experience. But it's good if you have a lot of computers like we do to back up various things while keeping it all separated from each other.)

Hope that helps.

hi lots of people experience the same problem you to, sometimes it comes down to being a little unknowledgeable, or something else.

1. So you go under the music and movies on the XMB and you should see your hard drive there, if not read below.

2. second possible reason, is that your hard drive is formatted insomething other than FAT32. to chack, plug it into a computer, then go to "My computer" or "computer", right click on your hard drive, and click properties. It'll say "File System: NTFS" most likely or a file system that isn't fat32.

If so, you will need to fomat your hard drive into the FAT32 format if you want to use it on your PS3. It's easy and youtube can help you out there. Just type "How to format in FAT32" and there's plenty step by step guides

luck

External HDDs tend to not work on the PS3. Ones with multiple partitions are unlikely to work. If it does, it should appear under the Music section on the XMB.

In the PS3 menu, look for the option that shows memory or hard drives. It should appear there. If not, there may be something wrong with your PS3