formating external USB hard drive

François Patte francois.patte at math-info.univ-paris5.fr
Sun Jan 29 09:22:35 UTC 2006


Claude Jones a écrit :
> On Saturday 28 January 2006 6:05 pm, John Summerfied wrote:
> 
>>Tim wrote:
>>
>>>On Fri, 2006-01-27 at 15:03 +0100, François Patte wrote:
>>>
>>>>I have a USB hard drive and 3 questions:
>>>>
>>>>1- I suppose that this hd is dos-formatted by default. Is it because
>>>>this that I had a problem of file size limitation? I couldn't create a
>>>>file more than 4.2Gb.
>>>
>>>I don't know the filesize limit for DOS, but I thought it was less than
>>
>>WinXP Home stopped at 2 Gb for fat32.
> 
> 
> At the risk of sticking my foot in my mouth, something is not computing in 
> this discussion - I've probably missed a salient point, but, in case I 
> haven't --- I currently have a 160GB external USB drive connected to this 
> computer. It is formatted as FAT32. I just double checked. I also just copied 
> a big media file over to it and played it back with Kaffeine, and that worked 
> fine. 
> 
> FAT32 size limitation is in the terrabytes with some caveats...
> This is form the MS site:
> 
> In theory, FAT32 volumes can be about 8 terabytes; however, the maximum FAT32 
> volume size that Windows XP Professional can format is 32 GB. Therefore, you 
> must use NTFS to format volumes larger than 32 GB. However, Windows XP 
> Professional can read and write to larger FAT32 volumes formatted by other 
> operating systems.

You maybe make some confusion here: the topic was the max size of a file
under a filesystem, not the max size of a partition you can format
according to a filesystem.

Anyway, I'm not an expert at all (if not why should I ask questions!): I
was stuck building a file on a Fat32 filesystem, using "cat file1
file2.... fileN > file"

After sometimes I found the ubuntu doc (in French) which clearly explain
 different filesystems and their limitations...

 http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/installation/systeme_de_fichiers

Regards.

-- 
François Patte
UFR de mathématiques et informatique
Université René Descartes
http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte




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