How to determine if FAT32 is enabled on a hard drive

Updated: 01/24/2018 by Computer Hope
Computer hard drive

FAT32 is only available in Windows 95 rev2 (OSR2), Windows 98, Windows 2000, and later versions of Windows. If you have Windows NT 4.0 or below, it does not support FAT32. To determine if your drives are running in FAT32 refer to the following instructions.

  1. Open My Computer and highlight the drive in question.
  2. Once highlighted, right-click the drive and select Properties.
  3. If the File system indicates FAT32 instead of FAT (file allocation table), it's enabled.
Tip

For any version of Windows that supports it, we highly recommend NTFS (NTFS file system) over FAT32 unless FAT32 is required by an older version of Windows.