Fat32 partition size limit (OT in uk.d-i-y)

Just (today) bought a Verbatim 1TB USB-3[1] external drive for general backup purposes, plus transferring data between computers - all Windoze, but a mixture of XP, W7-32bit and W7-64bit.

It came formatted as Fat32, and there appears to be a single partition occupying the whole of its 1TB capacity.

However, the on-disk manual which came with it seems to suggest that Fat32 partitions are limited to a maximum of 32GB. I know that to be untrue because I've got a 64GB thumb drive which is formatted as Fat32 - and that's definitely got more than 32GB of data on it. Some sources seem to suggest that the default Windoze format command cannot format more than 32GB at a time in Fat32 but there are third-party alternatives which can.

Can anyone shed any light on this please?

The manual suggests that users may want to create multiple partitions on the disk - possibly a mixture of Fat32 (for maximum transportability) and NTFS (for fewer size - presumably both partition size *and* file size - limitations). If I understand it correctly, it's telling me to delete the existing partition - so the whole thing becomes unallocated space - and then create the required new partitions. Questions: a) is this necessary? b) if I delete the existing partition, presumably the documents and software which came on the disk will be lost unless I copy it all elsewhere first? c) If I create multiple partitions (say, 1 fat32 primary, 1 Extended - containing several NTFS logical partitions) and give each one a drive letter, will the drive letters change depending on which system it's connected to at any one time - or do I need to choose drive letters which won't conflict with those in use on *any* of the systems to which I will connect it? d) if I back up my operating systems, using something like Paragon Rescue & Backup software (which is stand-alone, and boots from a CD) will that software be able to see all the partitions? [My current thoughts are that I will use a separate partition for each system I'm backing up - so that each one is self-contained].

I think I know broadly what I want to achieve, but I feel that I need to understand all the issues before starting to muck about with this new disk.

Any constructive comments will be greatly appreciated.

[1] It's backwards compatible with USB-2, which is how I shall be using it - in the short term, at any rate.
Reply to
Roger Mills
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Unless you foresee that you will be using it with something that doesn't support NTFS, I'd just repartition it as a single NTFS partition and be done with it.

Was scratching my head the other day trying to copy an 8Gb file to an empty 16Gb USB stick that I'd forgotten was formatted Fat32, because I'd used it with the TV which doesn't support NTFS :) :)

Reply to
Lee

I thought the 32GB limit was from within Windows 2000 - not a universal limit.

Reply to
polygonum

I did note your comment about backing up different OSes to different partitions, if that's your preference then Windows should assign them a drive letter as necessary when the disk is mounted.

Personally, different directories are good enough for me, while different partitions may offer some protection against certain kinds of disk corruption, ICBA with having to remember which partition relates to what :)

Reply to
Lee

Yup partitions can be larger than 32G, but the windows 7 format program can't produce them.

Not really. Depends a bit on what you want to store on it. Large FAT partitions can waste a fair amount of space if you are storing lots of small files.

Correct

Recent versions of windows can also cope with multiple primary partitions, which is usually simpler than titting about with extended partitions.

Generally it will sort it out when it mounts them, and allocate available drive letters.

(note with NTFS partitions you don't have to allocate them letters - you can mount them unix style in a folder tree elsewhere)

Probably - so long as it can see NTFS partitions on external media.

Reply to
John Rumm

See here for one of those alternatives:

formatting link

Reply to
B00ze/Empire

That does seem to be a common default pre-formatted FS choice for USB drives. I believe this is chosen as a default since just about any other OS can read and write to FAT32 volumes, even Apple Macs!

AFAICR, even the version of FDISK and the FORMAT commands that came with winME could create larger than 32GB FAT32 partitions. I think the limit was the maximum LBA addressing limit (128GB, ISTR) inherent in win9x OSes.

WinNT inherited a 32GB limited version of its FAT32 partitioning utility all the way from win2k and up. The limit wasn't an OS one for win2kSP3 and above (with a simple registry edit to enable large LBA support - needed even for SP4 - large LBA support for winXP didn't become automatically enabled until SP2 or SP3).

I think Microsoft didn't want to encourage the use of large FAT32 volumes so they didn't update their partitioning tool as a matter of deliberate 'neglect'.

As you know, there are plenty of third party partition management tools which will happily create FAT32 partitions in excess of 1 TB if that is your desire. If, as you've implied, you're never ever going to attach it to an Apple Mac or a PC with a windows version less than 2000, you won't require FAT32 in any shape or form so you might as well delete the FAT32 partition and reformat it as NTFS.

If you're going to use it purely as a data store, you might as well install a single partition covering the whole of the disk space. Further, if you want to avoid the risk of accidently confusing the boot process on the connected machine or eliminate the risk of accidently formatting it as a boot disk by forgetting to disconnect it when rebooting or re-installing an OS, I'd suggest you only create an extended partition in which to add your single logical disk volume.

Although the drive is small enough not to rely on an Advanced 4k sector Format, I'd check on this before you partition it just in case the disk uses AF sectoring to achieve its capacity on lower density media by virtue of the slight increase in capacity that results from the reduced format overhead per kilobyte of disk space.

One way to be certain about this is to install Paragon's Alignment tool so you can just prep the disk in the usual way with diskmanager and check the result _before_ you start using it to store data.

If the Alignment tool shows it to be in need of alignment, you can use the tool to adjust the partition in just a minute or two versus hours and hours of runtime when the partition already contains a collection of files.

HTH

Reply to
Johny B Good

Another possibility, is FAT32 may not have the level of patent protection that NTFS and ExFAT do. You'd need to check the articles on all three of those, to get a feel for how "safe" it is to ship product with FAT32 on it.

formatting link

(See "Challenges and lawsuits")

"Developers of open source software have designed methods intended to circumvent Microsoft's patents."

On a 1TB drive, FAT32 is not the best choice, since the maximum file size is ~4GB. To fill the whole space, you'd need at least 250 files, as no file can be bigger than 4GB. This is a problem if you put .vhd files, .iso files, .mrimg (Macrium) files or Acronis backup files. As many backup programs can easily make a file bigger than that limit. Even a download could end up bigger than that.

The 32GB limit is Microsoft imposed, as a "feature" of the OS. In the opinion of Microsoft, they decided that 32GB was "big enough". Whereas the definition of the file system, allows a FAT32 partition to be 2TB. To be able to format a freshly declared 2TB partition, you could try the Ridgecrop formatter, as it has no issues with helping you out. Whereas Microsoft will simply remove FAT32 from the format menu, if the partition you want to format is too big.

The file allocation table (FAT) size is likely a function of the size of the partition, so doing that also causes a rather large FAT. But with the big machines today (lots of RAM, lots of address space), that's probably not a big deal. A fifteen year old machine might have an issue, due to "slow everything" in hardware.

Paul

Reply to
Paul

Roger Mills wrote on 10/30/2014 5:38 PM:

If you want NTFS and don't want to lose the data just convert the format:

At the command prompt, type the following, where drive letter is the drive that you want to convert: convert drive letter: /fs:ntfs For example, type the following command to convert drive E to NTFS: convert e: /fs:ntfs

See this for additional info.

formatting link

Reply to
Big Al

You can always give partitions names too (-:

Reply to
J. P. Gilliver (John)

[]

Well, depending on whether you do clones or images, and whether compression is on if you do clones, but on the whole, yes.

Why is scattered free space a problem ... []

[] ... except that (-:! [_Could_ be that Roger intends to make partitions the same size as the systems being backed.]
Reply to
J. P. Gilliver (John)

I use mainly XP on FAT32. NTFS seems to be more efficient and it can handle files over 4 GB, so I keep one NTFS partition for large file storage. XP-FAT32 has no trouble accessing the NTFS partition. The reason I don't go with all NTFS is because user file restrictions are nothing more than a nuisance complication for my purposes. But those complications are relevant only if the OS running is NTFS. In that case the FAT32 partitions are handy for their inability to makr files with restrictions.

Similarly, when I've dabbled with Linux I like to keep all files on FAT32 partitions, to escape the problems of Linux file restrictions.

There should be a way to simply shut off all of that, but unfortunately there isn't. Both systems are designed for commercial use with multiple users and "untrusted access" being commonplace.

Reply to
Mayayana

The maximum size for a FAT32 partition is something like 8TB. But FAT32 is not well suited for such huge partitions, NTFS works much better. Because of that, Windows systems that can use NTFS will not create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB.

This does not mean that a huge FAT32 partition can't be used with WinNT or Vista or later. It just means that tools included with the OS won't create such a partition. If you have a third-party tool to create a huge FAT32 partition, your Windows system will have no problem using it.

Reply to
Tim Slattery

And especially read here for additional info:

formatting link

It's an old web page, but as far as I know, it's still correct.

Also note that conversion is a big step, affecting everything on your drive. When you take such a big step, no matter how unlikely, it is always possible that something could go wrong. For that reason, it's prudent to make sure you have a backup of anything you can't afford to lose before beginning.

Reply to
Ken Blake

What restrictions are you referring to? Linux supports around 19 different file systems.

Reply to
Wildman

Wrong! Oh, so _very_ wrong!

Fragmentation only effects read/write performance, not space utilisation.

If the cloning software doesn't already create compressed images (most do), compression can give impressive image file size reductions on 'content free' images (but you may need to use a secure erase tool to 'zero out' the free allocation units on the original disk volume(s) before creating the image(s)).

Reply to
Johny B Good

I don't think he was talking about fragmentation - but rather about having lots of small free spaces distributed across multiple partitions. I'm not sure that it's a problem in my case, but it would in some cases reduce the available space when working within a particular partition.

Reply to
Roger Mills

Mayayana is referring to the file permissions model (755, 644 etc).

Linux doesn't enforce those for NTFS, at least not yet. Which makes Linux excellent for working around a file permissions problem visible in Windows.

And EXT2 on Linux, would support file permissions in similar ways to NTFS under Windows. The difference is, the permissions model for NTFS just never "clicked" with me, leaving me permanently unable to explain it thoroughly to others. I can only figure out the simplest of things on NTFS. (Like the read-only folder bit being overloaded as a folder customization flag.) If you read descriptions of this stuff up to the domain level, you're left speechless.

An example of an Access Control List fro Vista. Presumably this means something, but I'll "wait for the movie to come out" :-) See, my eyes are starting to glaze over already...

D:PAI (A;;FA;;;BA) (A;OICIIO;GA;;;BA) (A;;FA;;;SY) (A;OICIIO;GA;;;SY) (A;OICI;0x1200a9;;;BU) (A;OICIIO;SDGXGWGR;;;AU) (A;;LC;;;AU)

Paul

Reply to
Paul

Yeah, you're right. I should have read it more carefully. It looked at first glance like a reference to fragmentation. It would seem I owe Rodders an apology. :-(

Splitting a large HDD up into 2 or 3 partitions on a PC is well worth doing, whether the OS is windows or a *nix distro, simply to ease maintenance and reduce fragmentation induced performance fade (particularly in a windows setup due to endless update file churn) but tends to be pointless on additional HDDs or external backup drives unless there is some specific requirement.

In this case, there really doesn't seem to any 'special requirement' to split the drive into more than 1 partition space since the only OSes it needs to work with can all access NTFS disk volumes anyway.

Using seperate file folders to keep various backup groups seperated is perfectly adequate for this task without the risk of running out of space in one partition whilst another goes underutilsed.

Reply to
Johny B Good

Just to keep the LInux people happy, there's a thing called

which gives you EXT3 and 4 partitions read-write from Windows. It's handy for me because my PVR doesn't like big Fat32 partitions.

Andy

Reply to
Vir Campestris

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