Any way to make a large FAT32 Partition?
 

I just got a 120GB drive to put XP on, and I'm trying to format it as FAT32 so Linux can use it 2. So far, I've only been able to make partitions up to around 28 GB. Any way I can make one 120 GB FAT32 partition?

Check this: http://www.allensmith.net/Storage/HDDlimit/FAT32.htm
Basically you might want to make multiple partitions. You can always make one or two FAT32 partitions for Linux and Windows to use and make the rest into a NTFS partition just for Windows.

According to this microsoft link, its not possible with Windows XP Pro:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tre...c_fil_tdrn.asp

Josh

I just formatted a 10 gigger with 'mkdosfs -t 32 /dev/hda10' - that article says fat32 can be 8 terabytes but XP won't do it - maybe mkdosfs will.

(Stupid audio issues - I never would have thought my Windows sticking point would be a frigging audio file tagger/renamer.)

-- missed the post with the first article. Yeah - the space-waste is a point and - besides being a royal pain - NTFS is a better fs than fat32, so I would agree to put XP on NTFS. Whether you want to slice the rest in one go or several pieces, I dunno.

-- edit #2: there is no '-t' option in mkdosfs - I meant '-F'

OK, so what I want 2 do then is make a partition about 30-40 GB using NTFS, then make another partition with the remaining drive space FAT32. Know of any programs that can make a larger than 32 GB partition? Will Linux do it? Or is there another file system I can use that both Windoze XP and Linux will read and write?

That's what I just said - try mkdosfs - I don't know what the limits are on it, because I only did a 10 GB but I'm sure it isn't arbitrarily bound like NT's FAT32 formatter, so you can probably do whatever you want. And you don't necessarily need that much as NTFS - just a few gigs will hold the system - if you want your personal files to be share-able, you'd just be wasting the other 30+ if you made the NTFS that big.

As far as other filesystems, AFAIK, MS only reads MS unless you do networking. So fat12/16/32/NTFS are the only options.

Flipside, if all you want to do is *read* stuff, you can make the NTFS as big as you want. If you want read/write, it's much better (to say the least) to go with fat32.

You may also want to peruse this site where the author has claimed to make the first free NTFS read/write filesystem for GNU/Linux. I would think this would be preferable, but I have not had the chance to test it.

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

Josh

How do I run mkdosfs?

You shouldn't have to ask that question. But I'm glad you did because I told you wrong. :D Where is everybody? Somebody should have caught that. It's 'mkdosfs -F 32 partition'. Mixing up my options and commands. 'man mkdosfs' first to find out for yourself and make sure I'm not screwing something up again.

Just to go over what I did, allowing that I didn't take notes (though I should have) and may get it wrong again:

I was annoyed and impatient, so I just did 'cfdisk' and tacked on a ten gig partition to the unpartitioned space on my drive and changed the type to 0C (FAT32). Wrote it and rebooted (I've rebooted more in the past few days that I ever have on Linux.) Then did 'mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/hda10' and mounted it. I created a mount point under my home directory and put my gid and uid in the options field of /etc/fstab though most people seem to recommend 'umask=000'. Then copied crap over. Spiffy partition for Linux. Reboot yet again. Lo, an F: drive on Windows. Tag and rename files and reboot yet again. Play them in xmms.

Dunno what's right or wrong about that, but I'm playing a correctly tagged and named Ministry album now, so I can't complain.

--

I saw something about that NTFS thing - maybe on /. - seems really solid in principle.

Yes, I saw it on /. also, and one of my professors talked about it in class the other day, saying how it was pretty great. I'm going to try it one of these days, just don't have a setup that requires it right now, using Samba for all of my shared space.

Josh