Hard-drive formatting
 

Some time ago, I bought a 120GB external hard-drive to hold all my important files. When I first bought it, it came from the factory pre-formated in FAT32. The entire 120GB external hard-drive was formatted in one, single FAT32 partition.

This was when I was still using Windows XP. Eventually, I reformated it to NTFS so my files would be somewhat safer.

Now I am switching over to Linux. Trouble is, Linux can not write to the external hard drive in NTFS format, however, it can read from it with no problem.

Someone on another Linux forum told me to reformat it back to FAT32 and Linux would then be able to write to it as well. Which I did.

Trouble is, you can only reformat FAT32 in 32MB partition "chunks". This means I had to reformat it in three 32MB partition "chunks" and one 20MB partition "chunk". So now the drive is showing up as four seperate hard-drives which is not only annoying, it also more troublesome to deal with whenever I want to store files on my external hard-drive.

My question is this:
How come the factory can format the entire external hard-drive in one FAT32 partition, but yet I can only do it 32MB "chunks"?

Many Thanks
Scott:confused:

Check out this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...readid=335872, maybe it will shed some light. I'm sure searching would've found it ;)

Sorry but this doesn't really answer my question.

Scott

It does albeit not clearly...

You can format the entire disc from linux as a fat 32 partiton and windows won't have a problem recognizing it.

I know I've done it and it works.

Edit: The quote is from the link Matir provided and its quoted from Tinkster's post.

How can I format my external-hard drive from Linux (I'm currently running Ubuntu) in FAT32?

Assuming that sda1 is the drive in question, of course.

That *SHOULD* work. Read the man page for details.