Help with Fat32 please :)

Hey people,

i have a question about Fat32, is there a way to take off the 4gb limitation it has when adding files? i have files that are over 10 gigs i need it to use fat32 and not ntsc. Are there any mac or windows tools that can do this?

Thanks

Yes, it's called exFAT. I assume you have a USB drive or those high capacity SD cards. They work best with FAT32 format and not exFAT or NTFS. Even if you manage to format them to something else, they are very tricky and files don't often stays in the drive. Like they disappear after HOURS of transferring GBs of data to these drives. Put it on a portable HD, it'll save you days of research and testing and formatting and transferring files and pulling your hair out.

i have an external 2TB western digtial... Thanks

One question: I assume you have an older computer system?

I think it may be that your PC does not recognize larger drives and if that's the
case your bios may need to be upgraded. That's if I'm understanding your
problem correctly.

EmailMaster said:

i have an external 2TB western digtial... Thanks

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Update Bios to can fat32 work whit largest file? Are you fine man Simple solutions for this problem ppl find it when make NTFS.Don`t waste time to make research simple convert fat32 to ntfs,you don`t have what to lost if you make it correct

this may help or may not: something is fucked up if your external drive uses FAT32 instead of NTFS

only solution i can think of: you need to reformat your HDD to NTFS

search with the exact type of your HDD + motherboard + OS on Google and see what turns up, chances somebody already had the exact same problem before what you're having now

You can't remove that limitation any more than you can divide by zero. the "32" in FAT32 refers to the 32-bit architecture; it cannot directly address more than 4Gb.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/32-bit

wrangler said:

You can't remove that limitation any more than you can divide by zero. the "32" in FAT32 refers to the 32-bit architecture; it cannot directly address more than 4Gb.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/32-bit

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They cannot divide by zero.... but then can do this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

Virus1 said:

They cannot divide by zero.... but then can do this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

Click to expand...

...which is an entirely differnet file system. I was simply pointing out that FAT32 has an absolute inherent limitation based upon its architecture.

Why can't you convert to ntfs?

Stay away from fat32. Unless your OS is windows 98 you will have no problem using NTFS.

Only reason why fat32 is still present in windows is for backwards compatibility. Fat is not faster, is not "safer", its inferior in every aspect.

In fact its the exact opposite.
NTFS is faster and way, WAY more stable. One small data fuck up on a HDD with FAT32 storage and all your data will be lost.

There is a good reason why NTFS replaced FAT32. Let the dinosaur die.

gianni said:

Stay away from fat32. Unless your OS is windows 98 you will have no problem using NTFS.

Only reason why fat32 is still present in windows is for backwards compatibility. Fat is not faster, is not "safer", its inferior in every aspect.

In fact its the exact opposite.
NTFS is faster and way, WAY more stable. One small data fuck up on a HDD with FAT32 storage and all your data will be lost.

There is a good reason why NTFS replaced FAT32. Let the dinosaur die.

Click to expand...

well, i can also mention you a good reason why FAT32 is still around on flash drives for instance: you can unplug a flash drive without using safe removal and you won't have any data loss, but if you do the same with a flash drive which is formatted to NTFS file system, you'll more than likely will suffer bigger or smaller data loss

HoNeYBiRD said:

well, i can also mention you a good reason why FAT32 is still around on flash drives for instance: you can unplug a flash drive without using safe removal and you won't have any data loss, but if you do the same with a flash drive which is formatted to NTFS file system, you'll more than likely will suffer bigger or smaller data loss

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That's a fair point it's about the only plus though I still run my pen drives on ntfs, having to run the safe removal utility is a worthy price in exchange for large file capabilities

HoNeYBiRD said:

well, i can also mention you a good reason why FAT32 is still around on flash drives for instance: you can unplug a flash drive without using safe removal and you won't have any data loss, but if you do the same with a flash drive which is formatted to NTFS file system, you'll more than likely will suffer bigger or smaller data loss

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That is false. I killed my USB sticks back then with 64MB on FAT32 plenty of times.

Reason that happens is because data transfer was not buffered. In other words, there is no transactional logs.

If anything then NTFS is MORE resilient against that since it offers transcriptional log with every change that was commited on the hard drive.

Talking about NTFS here:
If you interrupt a transfer mid-way by jacking out your cable then latest commitment on the HDD will not "success" flag. Next time when you replug your drive it will revert the corrupted commit to last successful one. This prevents data from being corrupted.

FAT32 does not have that. Do you remember good ol' "This drive is unformatted. You need to format it before you can use it" popup when you plug in your drive? Thank fat for that.

If I remember correctly there is a trick in the XP that does not support this fully and it will end up wrecking your partition either way. It works flawlessly in windows vista and upper.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. It's been a while since I researched this.

If you are concerned about that, you can actually enable/disable write buffering (it might be done by setting the type to "removable", I can't remember which version) on a per-drive basis.

There is a very simple solution to this - I just did it on my 1Tb external HD a few weeks ago when I needed to copy some 8Gb virtual drives:

1) copy everything off the external drive that you value
2) Reformat the external Hd and make sure you choose NTFS - it took me 2 attempts for this to be successful, BUT IT CAN AND DOES WORK.

3) 4Gb FAT32 problem is now gone.

(BTW - I am an IT professional for a full time job for now... until I make enough to do IM at home).
PS. It doesn't matter what what OS you have. I still have XP on the computer that I formatted the drive to NTFS. In a couple of weeks I will be buying new computers to replace the older machines I have at home.

gianni said:

That is false. I killed my USB sticks back then with 64MB on FAT32 plenty of times.

Reason that happens is because data transfer was not buffered. In other words, there is no transactional logs.

If anything then NTFS is MORE resilient against that since it offers transcriptional log with every change that was commited on the hard drive.

Talking about NTFS here:
If you interrupt a transfer mid-way by jacking out your cable then latest commitment on the HDD will not "success" flag. Next time when you replug your drive it will revert the corrupted commit to last successful one. This prevents data from being corrupted.

FAT32 does not have that. Do you remember good ol' "This drive is unformatted. You need to format it before you can use it" popup when you plug in your drive? Thank fat for that.

If I remember correctly there is a trick in the XP that does not support this fully and it will end up wrecking your partition either way. It works flawlessly in windows vista and upper.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. It's been a while since I researched this.

Click to expand...

what you said about NTFS is only true for HDDs, but i've talked about flash drives/pen drives

on a side note: i've never had a problem with FAT32 pen drives, i still has a 32MB one since 10+ years now

HoNeYBiRD said:

what you said about NTFS is only true for HDDs, but i've talked about flash drives/pen drives

on a side note: i've never had a problem with FAT32 pen drives, i still has a 32MB one since 10+ years now

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What is the difference? :O

From what I am aware as much as OS is concerned there is none.
OS will write to a storage drive with either ntfs/fat on a kernel level. File system determines how data is arranged, but how it is written physically is dependant on the controller of the storage engine.

Fuck, you got me all curious now.
If I have time I'll do some research on this and report back.


Got a few myself as well. 32mb, 64mb, 256, 1GB ones.
32mb is without casing so I rather not touch it. I still hold a grudge against the 64mb after it lost my 5 paged exam essay in school and scored me an F with "you need to format this drive before you can use it", I gave 256mb to my mom for backup of her bank certificate and 1GB I think dad is using for pictures.

Btw, you can convert FAT32 to NTFS without formatting.
convert [drive letter]:/fs:ntfs

There will be no data loss. Execute the command and wait for it to finish.

You cannot convert from ntfs to fat32 though. Only way to do that is formatting entire partition.

Edit: here's a nice short article explaining what I was saying above.
http://www.theeldergeek.com/ntfs_or_fat32_file_system.htm

Reliability

FAT32 drives are much more susceptible to disk errors.

NTFS volumes have the ability to recover from errors more readily than similar FAT32 volumes.

Log files are created under NTFS which can be used for automatic file system repairs.

NTFS supports dynamic cluster remapping for bad sectors and prevent them from being used in the future.

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Also, comparing the speed of the two.
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/125116-fat16-vs-fat32-vs-ntfs-speed-on-usb-stick/

FAT32:
Stick prepared for ~21 min. (1253 secs.)
Text mode copy part with USB write-protection- 12:58
Text mode copy part without USB write-protection- 7:15

NTFS:
Stick prepared for ~4 min. (238 secs.)
Text mode copy part with USB write-protection- 1:42
Text mode copy part without USB write-protection- 1:45

Click to expand...

NTFS is 5x faster than fat32 in the tests he did.
His test can be biased so test it yourself to verify it.

Taking into consideration that FAT32 does not support file, folder and user permission ( a MUST in network sharing!! ), does not support compression (ntfs can compress files on the fly and thus save disk space), cannot be used for files larger than 4GB and has no quotas (I use this to set how much space my family can use on my HDD's) I'd say NTFS is the way to go.