FAT-32 Partition Limit

[OzDog]

Does anyone know if I am correct in saying that there is a 30Gb limit on FAT-32 partitions?

I have an 80Gb data drive that I would like to make into one big partition so that I can access it from Win2K & Linux.

My only other option is to create 3 partitions and mount them under folders, but then I lose the flexibility I'm after.

Any help appreciated.
Dog Cheers,
Sam

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[John Lewis]

Yes and no. The actual limit on a FAT32 partition is on the order of 8TB. W2K can mount and read a large partition, but the catch is, W2K can't format a FAT32 bigger than 32GB.

There is a project to allow linux to mount NTFS. The last I checked, it was stable on the current kernel but there were some legal issues (M$ wants money) that may halt developement. Check at sourceforge.net, I'm pretty shure it was there.

 

[wolluf]

So to add to mhkwood's post - you can use fdisk & format from a win9x/ME boot floppy to create an 80GB fat32 partition (which win2k will happily be able to access). You might need this patch (for win9x)

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q263044

 

[OzDog]

Sweet, thanks guys.

mhkwood - As I understand, it is still a read-only thing, and I need read/write access to all data.

Think I will try this from Linux.

We shall see... Cheers,
Sam

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[John Lewis]

Nope. Not a read only thing. Never was, so far as I know. The 32GB format limit is artificially imposed by M$ to promote the use of NTFS.

I ran my old W95 drive with a 36GB partition in my W2K system for quite some. W2K was booting from another drive, but I did read and write to the partition.

 

[waltt]

An 80gb partition should be no problem but ran into a problem creating a 5gb file with Win2k on a fat32 partition and had to convert to NTFS.

 

[wolluf]

waltt - that's because max file size on fat32 is 4gb.

 

[TonHu]

What-if you used samba on linux to access the NTFS-share as 1 big partition, mounted under your home dir? With the latest samba patches should be POC!
If that PC is big enough to 'handle' W2K it won't mind running Linux with additional samba deamon

HTH
TonHu