in desperate need of help[HDD to ps2 issue]

hello all,

i come here seeking help to my problem for which i have worked on for several days now.. it is this; my hdd is the model from seagate it is "ST912082 2AS" i dont know if that model name and number would be helpful but it is a HDD i salvaged recently from a old broken korean laptop and i put an enclosure on it so i can acess it per usb by my pc just fine but the problem is that when i put games on it i try convert them to usb format "ul" then keep them on the root of my hdd or put them into the "DVD" folder and the "ul.cfg" in th root of my hdd but no matter what i do my hdd isnt recognized by opl or usbextreme/advance nor ps2esdl and now i am quite desperate for a solution and if needed my hdd is in FAT32 format with 19.53GB space and 92.62GB unallocated space (my hdd partition is primary so thats not the problem) i was thinking maybe th problem i the unallocated space ? maybe i must assign that space somewhere.. but then again this windows puts its limit for the FAT32 format at 32gb so.. i couldnt surpass that limit AND have all the hdd space on one partition.. so i am left clueless as to what to do, please anybody help me if you can~ it is very much appreciated thankyou very much in advance

PS: sorry if this is the wrong section but i didnt know where to post it

Quote:

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Originally Posted by xXyunaXx

hello all,

i come here seeking help to my problem for which i have worked on for several days now.. it is this; my hdd is the model from seagate it is "ST912082 2AS" i dont know if that model name and number would be helpful but it is a HDD i salvaged recently from a old broken korean laptop and i put an enclosure on it so i can acess it per usb by my pc just fine but the problem is that when i put games on it i try convert them to usb format "ul" then keep them on the root of my hdd or put them into the "DVD" folder and the "ul.cfg" in th root of my hdd but no matter what i do my hdd isnt recognized by opl or usbextreme/advance nor ps2esdl and now i am quite desperate for a solution and if needed my hdd is in FAT32 format with 19.53GB space and 92.62GB unallocated space (my hdd partition is primary so thats not the problem) i was thinking maybe th problem i the unallocated space ? maybe i must assign that space somewhere.. but then again this windows puts its limit for the FAT32 format at 32gb so.. i couldnt surpass that limit AND have all the hdd space on one partition.. so i am left clueless as to what to do, please anybody help me if you can~ it is very much appreciated thankyou very much in advance

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I'm not sure exactly what your problem is, but it could be simply that your USB/HDD combination doesn't match the needs for compatibility to the PS2 homebrew drivers. Unfortunately there are still several USB drive units (both HDDs and sticks) that simply don't work with the PS2 homebrew drivers, though the majority now work fine.

Regardless of that problem, you should get some other program to handle your USB formatting needs. Windows (all modern versions) has no problem at all in handling larger FAT32 partitions. It is just that the Windows disk manager has this formatting limitation in its default configs, and they never made that part user configurable...

So any third-party formatter should be able to do the job, including the primitive command-line program "ul_format.exe" that came with USBAdvance.

You'll at least have a better chance for PS2 homebrew compatibility if you've formatted the drive to a single FAT32 partition. And in doing so it may be best to start by letting the Windows disk manager format the drive to a single primary NTFS partition. And then use another program like "ul_format.exe" to handle the re-formatting to FAT32.

That "ul_format" program can not partition a drive by itself, and needs you to specify a drive letter for an existing partition that it is to format, so the re-partitioning is best done by the Windows disk manager.

Best regards: dlanor

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dlanor

I'm not sure exactly what your problem is, but it could be simply that your USB/HDD combination doesn't match the needs for compatibility to the PS2 homebrew drivers. Unfortunately there are still several USB drive units (both HDDs and sticks) that simply don't work with the PS2 homebrew drivers, though the majority now work fine.

Regardless of that problem, you should get some other program to handle your USB formatting needs. Windows (all modern versions) has no problem at all in handling larger FAT32 partitions. It is just that the Windows disk manager has this formatting limitation in its default configs, and they never made that part user configurable...

So any third-party formatter should be able to do the job, including the primitive command-line program "ul_format.exe" that came with USBAdvance.

You'll at least have a better chance for PS2 homebrew compatibility if you've formatted the drive to a single FAT32 partition. And in doing so it may be best to start by letting the Windows disk manager format the drive to a single primary NTFS partition. And then use another program like "ul_format.exe" to handle the re-formatting to FAT32.

That "ul_format" program can not partition a drive by itself, and needs you to specify a drive letter for an existing partition that it is to format, so the re-partitioning is best done by the Windows disk manager.

Best regards: dlanor

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ah i see.. i have read it and understood.. so i would need to completely format my hdd to fat32 with no leftover space at all right? like no unallocated space? hm.. i would use ul_format.exe but the problem is that i do not know to use the commandline or how to make ul_format.exe work to format my hdd in my case, but the biggest problem i have is that currently my hdd is not recognized by OPL at all and not even usb advance or usb extreme and it doesnt even show up in the file browser on ule so i was wondering if my hdd which is of the brand seagate is simply not compatible for use with the ps2 as an external hdd?
ps: for now i will try to format the hdd completely to ntfs and then to fat32(using a gui type program if possible, couldou reccomend me any? i used fat32 formatter once but that program didnt format all of the space on the hdd it left an unallocated space of 9mb and i think thats the reason why the opl cannot read the hdd, so any solution to format the hdd completey to fat32 would be much appreciated and once again thanks alot)

sorry for the very long post i just had a lot of information to put out there i hope you dont mind
thanks for your reply dleanor much appreciated