I have a Pioneer DVD player with a USB port in the front for connecting USB storage devices to so that I can watch movies, look at pictures or listen to music. It worked fine with a 1GB USB stick, so I went ahead and purchased a 500GB Maxtor OneTouch 4 external USB 2.0 hard disk to play media from. When I plugged the disk in, it wouldn’t read it. So I tried another 200GB disk I had had for some time, then another 1TB disk. None of them could be read.

I tried the memory stick again and it worked, so I then checked to see what format the disks were, and they were of course NTFS. The memory stick was FAT32. I realised that my DVD player only reads FAT32, so I thought, OK, I will just reformat it and away I go. But, Windows XP can only format hard drives in FAT32 up to 2gb due to some limitations as shown here on the Microsoft website.

I had thought of trying to use some sort of boot disk,management tool or 3rd party application, and I came across a free utility called “FAT32 formatter” available at this website, downloaded it and ran the simple DOS command and had a nice big FAT32 partition that my DVD player can now read.