[nflug] Formatting FAT32 partitions

[Cyber Source]

As far as I know there is no limit as to the size of formatting, at 
least in Linux. I do know that if a drive is beyond 40GB, xtra pooched 
:) will ONLY show ntfs as a formatting option, this use to drive me nuts 
on clients machines, oh and it your formatting like 80 in ntfs, go to 
lunch, wash your car, cause it's gonna be a while.
Now there's probably good reason from a fragmenting view NOT to format 
such a large partition with FAT32 but it can easily be done as such 
"mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/hd??" Where ?? is your drive letter and partition 
number for your IDE drive, although thinking about it now, if it's a USB 
external drive it will probably be recognized as a /dev/sd? vs /dev/hd?.
Anyway, watch how freaking fast that formats that drive, you will 
probably think it didn't work but it did. The only thing that format 
line will not do is copy the mysterious signature line that windows puts 
there when formatting and the ONLY resulting problem would be that you 
couldn't boot from that drive if you were to install a windows os on it, 
it needs that signature line to boot from but all else will be perfectly 
fine, I don't know how or if it's possible to write the signature from 
Linux land. Unless gonna boot windows from the drive, it's a mute point.
On the file size issue, there are file size limitations, and I'm sure my 
memory is a little foggy about this but I believe, Fat32's limit is 2GB 
and NTFS is 4GB. EXT2/3's use to have a 4GB limit as well but not 
anymore. Correct me if I'm wrong on these guys but the long story short 
is, if think it's strange because you found a file limit size, it's not.

Tony Abou-Assaleh wrote:

>Can Linux/BSD format FAT32 partitions that are about 250GB? It turns out
>that neither Win2000 nor WinXP can do it (by design).
>
>An even funnier thing, I don't seem to be able to create files larger than
>4GB on this pre-formatted external Drive.
>
>I am thinking about formating it using ext3 or UFS and then making it
>available locally to windows using NFS or Samba. Does anyone have
>experience doing a similar thing? What file system is best for such
>partitions? (250GB USB HDD). Portability is certainly a concern, so even
>if WinBlah doesn't support it, I'd like that at least Linux, FreeBSD, and
>OSX be able to support it.
>
>Cheers,
>
>TAA
>
>-----------------------------------------------------
>Tony Abou-Assaleh
>Lecturer, Computer Science Department
>Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada, L2S 3A1
>Office: MC J215
>Tel:    +1(905)688-5550 ext. 5243
>Fax:    +1(905)688-3255
>Email:  taa at acm.org
>WWW:    http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/~taa/
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