Flash Drive Formatting

A

aferrito

Member
Trying to recover a Windows 7 computer and I am using a Windows 10 computer to create a Windows 7 bootable flash drive. I'm struggling with the formatting of a 512 GB flash drive. I don't s32ee an option to format the flash drive as Fat32. I only see options for exFAT or NTFS. The Create USB utility will not accept either.

Also, I am not familiar with partitions and not sure if I need to create partitions as part of this process.

I'm somewhat PC literate but have never had to do any of this before.

Can someone please assist.

Thanks,
Al
 
I found a solution.

Apparently Windows 10 no longer offers the FAT32 option under the format right click process for files greater than 32GB but there are ways to still format the file under Windows 10. I found this site:

windowsloop.com

How to Format Drive in FAT32 in Windows 10 & 11

FAT32 is one of the most popular and versatile file formats for a drive. Follow these steps to format a drive in FAT32 in Windows 10.
windowsloop.com windowsloop.com

and I am using the CMD option. It takes a while and is still in process but it looks like it will work.

Hope this helps future users.

Thanks,

Al
 
Glad you were lucky finding one. I had a similar problem but with mine it was simply finding a driver for it. Once that was found off it went formatting FAT32 OK.
 
Thanks. I partitioned the USB drive below 32GB and was able to format it FAT32. I was able to load in the bootable Windows7 files and start up the computer.
Unfortunately, my hard drive is fried and I can't get any information off of it.

I've seen some youtube videos of people opening up the drive and gently forcing the arm back into home position but I don't had screws on my hard drive to open it.
 
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