Re: vfat not seen by Vista

On Thu, 30 Aug 2007, class_a wrote:-

<snip>

I did try to do that with WinXP but it
kept barfing, and probably for the reason VWWall gives (partition size
32Gb).

It's a deliberate design limitation of XP. The formatter supplied with
previous versions could format a FAT32 partition of sizes much larger
than 32GB. Apparently M$ decided to impose this limit, then tried
revising history by claiming the limit was always intended to be there.
As to why they introduced the limit, perhaps it was to force the use of
NTFS instead.

To format the entire HD as a single Fat32 device I had to use
the Maxtor disk partitioning tool. That is what made it visible in both
operating systems. Maybe the Maxtor partitioning tools doesn't have the
bugs you mention in XP? Just a thought.

So far, I've not had a problem using mkdosfs to create a FAT32 file
system, including making a single 80GB file system on a removable USB
device[0]. It's been quite a while since I did it but, IIRC, I just
used:

mkdosfs -F 32 -n "$NEW_NAME}" /dev/sda1

I don't recall using the "-s" option to specify the sectors per cluster,
leaving it up to mkdosfs to choose a suitable value.


[0] I did reformat it as ext3 but swapped it back to FAT32 so I could
share it with a Windows-only system and not need to locate drivers for
it.

Regards,
David Bolt

--
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