[nflug] Formatting FAT32 partitions

[Richard Hubbard]

There is a 'hard limit' on FAT 32, which is arrived at
from how FAT works.

There is a table containing the addresses of each 4096
byte cylinder in the hard drive.  The table has a 32
bit number which allows for 4,294,967,296 cylinders
that can be addressed.  multiply that by the size of
the cylinders (4096 bytes) and you get a maximum size
of 17,592,186,044,416 bytes, or 17,600 GB is the
maximum size of the hard drive that can be formatted. 
The windows formatter probably has the limit of 40gb
due to dumb programming. 

having said that, I have to agree with the earlier
posts that for any large hard drive, you really want
journalling. Reiser, ext3 and NTFS all have
journalling which will cut down on the number of times
your drive needs to be scanned due to errors.

--- Michael Phillips <linux478 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I have formatted a 160gb drive with fat32.  There is
> a file size limit of 4gb. 
> 
> 
> Michael
> 
> --- Greg Neumann <DadNeumann at verizon.net> wrote:
> 
> > It's not just Windows that can't format the
> FAT32's that big. Right off 
> > hand, I cant' remember what the limit is, but I
> think it's somewhere 
> > around 90-110. It's just an inherent limitation of
> the FAT32 design. The 
> > individual file size limits are also limited, 4gb
> sounds about right. 
> > Separate partitions are the only way around this.
> I'm sure there's guys 
> > that can explain it better than I.
> > -Greg
> > 
> > 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/
> > >----------------------[THE
> END]----------------------
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> > >
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> > 
> 
> 
> Michael D. Phillips - A computer science enthusiast
> I do not hate Windows, I just like the alternatives
> better.
> Linux is my primary choice.
> 
> 
> 		
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