Re: vfat not seen by Vista

class_a wrote:

I had a similar issue with a large USB hard drive I recently bought.
When I got it, it was already formatted with NTFS so the first thing I
did was to reformat it with the partitioner in YaST as vfat which, like
you, I believe is FAT32. openSUSE saw the partition fine, but WinXP
didn't. WinXP could see the drive, but didn't recognise the partition
type. I then reformatted it again, with WinXP as FAT32 and it is now
visible on both openSUSE and WinXP.

No, I can't explain it but I'd be interested to hear an explanation if
anyone can!

Possible reasons can reside in the undocumented part of FAT, or in assumptions or restrictions built into the drivers. Did you ever see an official and complete FAT specification, released by Microsoft? To which all Windows versions comply?


You could help to explore the white spots in the FAT spec, by analyzing the different values in the volume management records, in the Linux and Windows formatted drives. Additional checks could be made with various Windows versions, but I suspect that this only would lead to more confusion. Every Windows versions has built in bugs, in the API implementation, which can affect even the lower level disc access. When the bug occurs in the same function with a known set of arguments in Win V.A, it may have been cured in V.B, in a way that only a different and previously working set of arguments now will cause an error in V.B. Unfortunately these bugs also can affect drivers, which for themselves are fully compliant to a documented (Linux) file system, but will fail in a Windows runtime environment.


In your case, I'd suspect that the mere size of the volume can cause trouble. VFAT volumes up to 4 or 32 GB might be compatible with more Windows versions, than are larger volumes. The larger a volume, the higher the risk that a bug in Windows will bite you, sooner or later.

DoDi
.

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