So I just bought a 1TB external HDD for my PS3 and spent about an hour messing with it wondering why it wasn't working with my PS3. I then found out that it had to be formatted to FAT32. After another hour of bellyaching I figured out a way that wouldn't have taken me more than 5 minutes if I knew any better.
So I thought I'd share with you the simplest way to format your external HDD to Fat32. I have Windows Vista by the way, but that shouldn't matter.
Step 1: Connect your HDD to your computer and check to make sure that your computer recognizes it.
Step 2: Go to the start menu and in the command prompt type "cmd" don't type the quotation marks and then press enter.
Step 3: Then, type "format /FS:FAT32 G:" again don't type the quotation marks, press enter.
Step 4: Now you have done all that you can, wait a few minutes while windows formats the HDD to FAT32.
Step 5: Finally, hook up the external HDD to the PS3 and you are good to go.
I thought I should make this thread because I was making it a lot harder than it needed to be, I hope you find this helpful.
