FAT32 Formatter
Sat, 18 Aug 07, 4:33 pm
I had problems formatting a 40 Gibibyte external harddisk using FAT32 file systems, there are limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP. According to Microsoft, Windows 2000 Professional and XP Professional cannot FORMAT a volume larger than 32 Gibibyte in size using their native FAT32 file system. Joanna’s Mac book could only read but not write on the formatted NTFS disk, so I googled and found out that its possible to format a volume using FAT32 file systems up to a maximum of 8 Tebibytes. The limiting factor for the FAT32 file systems is the cap of 4 Gibibyte file size whereas the NTFS has a max file size limit of 16 Exbibyte. The easy way out to format the 40 Gibibyte harddisk using Partition Magic, CompuApps SwissKnife, Parted Magic, GParted, FAT32 Formatter or Ranish Partition Manager, and voila ….. Joanna can assess the files in that harddisk. With ever increasing file size due to proliferation of media and graphics these days, the FAT32 file systems will soon be history, and its only practical to use file systems that can handle larger file size. There are other alternatives reading and writing into other filesystems from the Macbook such as using the MacFUSE and NTFS3G driver (see following links), but there are reports of errors when copying large number of files. Should try these drivers someday when its stable.
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