# Fat 32



## Richard King (Mar 25, 2002)

I have an external USB 160G hard drive that I would like to format as FAT32 one large partition. I have been unable to find a way to do so in my searches. Any ideas or suggestions? I have XP64 on one machine, or I can use a laptop with XP Pro.


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## Capmeister (Sep 16, 2003)

Why FAT32 and not NTFS?


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## Geronimo (Mar 23, 2002)

Everything I read about XP itself says that there is some limitation on FAT 32 partition size. they disagree on what the number is bit all are below the size you wnat.

Partition magic may be able to achieve this. I understand though that some computers---MACs in particular----have trouble reading these. Cap may be right about using NTFS but perhaps you are limited by the OS on some machines on a network.


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## Richard King (Mar 25, 2002)

I'm going to use it with a device that requires FAT32.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Richard King said:


> I have an external USB 160G hard drive that I would like to format as FAT32 one large partition. I have been unable to find a way to do so in my searches. Any ideas or suggestions? I have XP64 on one machine, or I can use a laptop with XP Pro.


XP (all perversions) and Win2K were "brained" with respect to their ability to create large partitions with FAT32.

You'll likely have to resort to a third party partitioning program or use a computer with some operating system other than XP installed. If you're willing to temporarily install the drive inside the computer, you could use a Windows 98 boot floppy with FDISK installed on it to create the partition. Many drive manufacturers now provide bootable software that will allow you to partion a drive, but it must be connected to an internal hard drive connector.

Popular partitioning programs can probably deal with USB connected drives directly but they cost almost as much as a new drive.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

Create a partition under Disk Management with a size less then 137 GB , then format it from there selecting FAT32. That's max size without using 3rd party SW.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Geronimo said:


> Cap may be right about using NTFS but perhaps you are limited by the OS on some machines on a network.


As long as the drive is network connected, it doesn't matter what the native format is. SMB takes care of serving up the file to any operating system that can deal with SMB.

USB, on the other hand, is a total crap shoot. This requires that all of the planets be in alignment _and_ that your appliance is able to deal with the particular USB interface that you have. Many USB capable cameras and media players can't handle the larger drives. I've got a new Dell at work that doesn't work with many popular USB thumb drives and it simply can't figure out what an ipod Nano is.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

P Smith said:


> Create a partition under Disk Management with a size less then 137 GB , then format it from there selecting FAT32. That's max size without using 3rd party SW.


FAT32 goes well beyond 137GB. I've have a 300GB USB drive that was originally formatted with a single FAT32 partition. I believe that the theoretical limit is into the terabytes. Microsoft contradicts themselves many times in their explanation of the limitations of FAT32.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

My point came from LBA-28 limitation by BIOS or some USB-IDE controllers.
If your do support LBA-48, then it could be bigger then 137 GB.

Then lets go into technical detail. What size of a cluster that disk have ?
What max size of cluster native XP could allocate for FAT32 file system ?

MS article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310525/EN-US/


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

P Smith said:


> My point came from LBA-28 limitation by BIOS or some USB-IDE controllers.
> If your do support LBA-48, then it could be bigger then 137 GB.


This has nothing to do with the FAT32 file system.


> Then lets go into technical detail. What size of a cluster that disk have ?
> What max size of cluster native XP could allocate for FAT32 file system ?


I would guess that the limit is completely artificial. Regardless of the various ways one might theorize about how to get around it, XP's storage manager will cap the partition at 32GB. As I said previously, Microsoft "brained" XP and 2000 with respect to FAT32. It was not an accident.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

harsh said:


> This has nothing to do with the FAT32 file system.<...>


It have to do with his 160 GB disk and IDE or/and USB controller in that disk enclosure !

Don't turn this discussion into scholastic exercise.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

P Smith said:


> It have to do with his 160 GB disk and IDE or/and USB controller in that disk enclosure !


USB interfaces are not in any important way affected by limitations of the drive table. The only issue relating to USB mass storage is the modern computer's ability to boot from it.


> Don't turn this discussion into scholastic exercise.


It appears to me that this is exactly what you were trying to do when you pasted a copy of a web page from Micro$oft (as opposed to the more widely accepted inclusion of a URI).


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

I did a change to URL form, but you're not that experienced in HDD parameters person; who still insist on insignificancy of LBA limitation. 
Well, I'm done with it.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

P Smith said:


> I did a change to URL form,


It is appreciated.


> but you're not that experienced in HDD parameters person; who still insist on insignificancy of LBA limitation.


I've been installing and partitioning hard drives in computers for over 20 years. I'm quite experienced. Perhaps the largest part of being experienced is knowing what not concern yourself with. Trying to apply "PC compatible" BIOS and CMOS limitations to USB mass storage devices is something my experience tells me not to get all worked up over.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

Oh, I recall one day back to 1990 or so, a young intern come to our company and ask what the differenrce between SCSI and IDE disks. That was you , son !


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Harsh- MaxBlast 4 will "initialize" (they call it) a single partition on a USB connection, but for anything beyond 137 you'll be using NTFS. It automatically switches to NTFS even if you manually set it for FAT32 once you type in beyond 137 for the partition size. 

An older OS such as win95 will see the files on a networked NTFS drive but will not see the full file long file names. Also, one cannot use an NTFS drive on the win 95 machine, just be able to read one running on a networked XP machine. That is my recollection but I admit not having tried it in many years. 
I don't know of any way to partition a drive FAT32 larger than 137G single partition using MaxBlast4 or the Windows XP Disk Manager. I never tried other $oftware Utilities like Partition Magic. 

Earlier you said "recognize into the terabytes. I agree with that but as I recall that was to recognize the size of the physical drive but a single partition was limited to 137. I'd like to know (academic interest only) how, as in what procedure you used you got a 300G partition with FAT32. 

Not sure if I'm saying anything new here but this has been my experience with the many drives I set up for my data storage.


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## cdru (Dec 4, 2003)

If you want scandisk/chkdsk to work on 95/98/Me machines, you must stick below the 127GB limit. This is a limitation of those utilities as they are only 16-bit apps. Also note that the larger the partition, the larger the cluster size will be. Depending on what you are saving, you can "lose" significant amount of disk space if you save many small files. For instance, a 1k file could take an entire 64K cluster, losing 63k of storage. If the majority of your files are larger, then this is less of an issue.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

137 Gb


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

DonLandis said:


> An older OS such as win95 will see the files on a networked NTFS drive but will not see the full file long file names.


Any OS with LFN support will see LFN, including Win95. I don't recall if there were issues accessing LFN from the command line in Win95. I have tested Win95's ability to access files through SMB on my Win2k machine that has short file names turned off (there is a registry entry for this).


> Earlier you said "recognize into the terabytes. I agree with that but as I recall that was to recognize the size of the physical drive but a single partition was limited to 137.


The filesystem cares only of one partition -- the one that it is managing. The ability to access large drives comes from a different corner of the operating system. The "terabytes" number comes from Microsoft's FAT32 versus NTFS FAQ.


> I'd like to know (academic interest only) how, as in what procedure you used you got a 300G partition with FAT32.


It came from the factory (Fantom Drives) with a single 300GB FAT32 partition. This is done ostensibly to provide for Mac interoperability. I reformatted it to two 150GB NTFS partitions using Win2k's storage manager.

Partition Magic and Acronis Disk Director will format very large FAT32 partitions. You cannot mount (*nix terminology) an entire partition into a "folder" on another partition with FAT32, but I'm pretty sure you can span drives with RAID software and format the resulting "drive" with FAT32.


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