FAT32 and 80 gig HDD?

[KRSESQ]

Here's a poser for you. Put an 80 gig Maxtor hdd in my system, formatted it with FAT32. Fdisk reported it as a 10 gig hdd but it formatted at full capacity. Microsoft Knowledge base assures me the Fdisk 10 gig thing is a "Cosmetic Issue, only" and the drive does indeed seem to be recognised by Win98 as an 80 gig drive.

But numerous other sources insist that FAT32 can only recognise up to 32 gigs. Wazzup?

Same thing happened with my 60 gig Fasttrak array.

Kevin

[az]

FAT32 can partition up to 8 TB.

The FDisk error is only cosmetic. Use percentages

AZ

[EDIT: Changed from 2 to 8 TB]

[KRSESQ]

Thanks, AZ.

Courtesy Microsoft Knowledge Base:

The following limitations exist using the FAT32 file system with Windows operating systems:
Clusters cannot be 64 kilobytes (KB) or larger. If clusters were 64 KB or larger, some programs (such as Setup programs) might calculate disk space incorrectly.
A volume must contain at least 65,527 clusters to use the FAT32 file system. You cannot increase the cluster size on a volume using the FAT32 file system so that it ends up with less than 65,527 clusters.
The maximum possible number of clusters on a volume using the FAT32 file system is 268,435,445. With a maximum of 32 KB per cluster with space for the file allocation table (FAT), this equates to a maximum disk size of approximately 8 terabytes (TB).
The ScanDisk tool included with Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Windows 98 is a 16-bit program. Such programs have a single memory block maximum allocation size of 16 MB less 64 KB. Therefore, The Windows 95 or Windows 98 ScanDisk tool cannot process volumes using the FAT32 file system that have a FAT larger than 16 MB less 64 KB in size. A FAT entry on a volume using the FAT32 file system uses 4 bytes, so ScanDisk cannot process the FAT on a volume using the FAT32 file system that defines more than 4,177,920 clusters (including the two reserved clusters). Including the FATs themselves, this works out, at the maximum of 32 KB per cluster, to a volume size of 127.53 gigabytes (GB).
You cannot decrease the cluster size on a volume using the FAT32 file system so that the FAT ends up larger than 16 MB less 64 KB in size.
You cannot format a volume larger than 32 GB in size using the FAT32 file system in Windows 2000. The Windows 2000 FastFAT driver can mount and support volumes larger than 32 GB that use the FAT32 file system (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create one using the Format tool. This behavior is by design. If you need to create a volume larger than 32 GB, use the NTFS file system instead.
NOTE: When attempting to format a FAT32 partition larger than 32 GB, the format fails near the end of the process with the following error:

Logical Disk Manager: Volume size too big.


Got it now, I think. I hope.

Had a devil of a time making sense of auto ignition timing way back when! Just no damned good with numbers (picked a hell of a career, didn't I?)

Kevin

[Elie]

If you are running WinXP or Windows 2K, there should be no exuce not to format your drive NTFS.

NTFS offers that extra level of security plus the support for OpenDML file sizes that could exceed 4 terrabytes.

Regards,
Elie

[Marshmallowman]

I use large fat32 parttions of about 40G as shared linux/win2k drives created using partitionmagic to resize to the required size.

It should easy enough to create large fat32's using linux Disk/ partition managment as well.

But all my other windows partitions are NTFS.

[Flying dutchman]

Fat32 has no 32 GB limitation. The limitation is in Windows 2000/XP. It refuses to format Fat32 partitions greater than 32 gb because Microsoft wants you to use NTFS on large drives.

If you partition your 80 gb drive from Windows 98 (e.g. from a bootable floppy) it will format just fine and Windows 2000/xp will read and write it just fine. Win98 FDISK will partition the drive correctly if you specify the size in percents rather than in GB. There's an overflow somewhere that causes the size indicator to "wrap around" so it does not display the correct size.