120gb FAT32 paritions?

[zombie [inh]]

Hi!

Just got one more HDD. The problem is that I can't seem to be able to
make 120gb FAT32 partitions anymore? Actually I can't get them bigger
then 32gb.
Yeah, I know that 32gb should be the limit, but hey I gots 3 more drives
workin nicely with big FAT32 partitions.

The thing is that for those drives I just ghosted the old drive to the
new, and Ghost automagicaly made 120gb FAT32 partitions. Now, I don't
wanna ghost (don't have the time ghost is oh so slooow). Tried Partition
Magic, but got wierd errors?

Now, I dont wanna 32gb paritions cause I have just enough letters taken
allready (just think about it, 4 drives, 1 dvd-r, 1 dvd, 1 flash drive,
1 image drive).

Heh, but it would be fun, heh, 1 drive 4 partitions That's 16 for
HDDs + 4 for the rest. 20 drive letters

And, yeah I know that I could just stick with NTFS.

But don't wanna.

--

Professor: Now, be careful, Fry. And if you kill anyone, make sure
to eat their heart to gain their courage. Their rich tasty courage.


_/zombie [INH]\_

 

[Andrew Rossmann]

[This followup was posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage and a copy
was sent to the cited author.]

Hi!

Just got one more HDD. The problem is that I can't seem to be able to
make 120gb FAT32 partitions anymore? Actually I can't get them bigger
then 32gb.
Yeah, I know that 32gb should be the limit, but hey I gots 3 more drives
workin nicely with big FAT32 partitions.

The thing is that for those drives I just ghosted the old drive to the
new, and Ghost automagicaly made 120gb FAT32 partitions. Now, I don't
wanna ghost (don't have the time ghost is oh so slooow). Tried Partition
Magic, but got wierd errors?

Now, I dont wanna 32gb paritions cause I have just enough letters taken
allready (just think about it, 4 drives, 1 dvd-r, 1 dvd, 1 flash drive,
1 image drive).

Heh, but it would be fun, heh, 1 drive 4 partitions That's 16 for
HDDs + 4 for the rest. 20 drive letters

And, yeah I know that I could just stick with NTFS.

But don't wanna.

Which version of Windows? Win2k/XP will not CREATE FAT32 partitions over
32G. They want you to use NTFS instead. They will use one created by other
software. If you know how, you could probably manually create the
partition table if needed. Or maybe a Win98 boot floppy's FDISK might
create one?

Is there any reason you want FAT32 instead of NTFS? At that size, you
have 32K clusters. NTFS will use 4K, and offers much greater security and
tends to be survive sudden power losses and other nasty things better than
FAT.

 

[zombie [inh]]

Jednom davno, ne znam vise kad, Andrew Rossmann duboko zamisljen/a rece:

Which version of Windows? Win2k/XP will not CREATE FAT32 partitions over
32G. They want you to use NTFS instead. They will use one created by other
software. If you know how, you could probably manually create the
partition table if needed. Or maybe a Win98 boot floppy's FDISK might
create one?

W2k here. Tried fdisk that came with w98, but no go. Someone sugested
that I get an updated one from M$. Still have to try.

Is there any reason you want FAT32 instead of NTFS? At that size, you
have 32K clusters. NTFS will use 4K, and offers much greater security and
tends to be survive sudden power losses and other nasty things better than
FAT.

Ok. That's a good question.
First: speed. NTFS is so slow. Ever tried to open a folder with many sub
folders? With a 7200rpm drive I have to wait around 40s (or more) for a
folder with 1000 subfolders. On an nonfragmented file system. DAMN.
FAT32 of course opens it instantly.

Second: Reliability. I still don't trust M$ and NTFS. When a partition
dies, it's dead. Especialy nowdays, when HDD quality, hey what quality
? Yeah HDD die these days preatty much reguraly. Just in the pas few
months 2 drives dided on me. No w2k/xp had them even listed or wanted to
do anything with them.

But in pure dos and w98 I could access the drives just fine. Partition
Magic just said that there was an error with the drives (no hint about
the kind of the error though). IBM infotool (quite usefull) said the
same. Ghost crashed upond accessing the drives Spinrite also (so much
for writing in assembler Scandisk in w98 also crashed, or just
hanged, can't remember.

But I still managed to back up in w98 to another drive. If I had NTFS i
would have 240gb less data to worry about.
W2k/xp just don't tolerate errors with HW.

That's enough for me to stick to FAT32.

But still I'd like to use NTFS for features like hard-links. Damn it
would make my life so much easier. It would be a breeze to sor all that
data. But NTFS is still far from mature unix filesystems...


--

Professor: Now, be careful, Fry. And if you kill anyone, make sure
to eat their heart to gain their courage. Their rich tasty courage.


_/zombie [INH]\_

 

[J.Clarke]

Jednom davno, ne znam vise kad, Andrew Rossmann duboko zamisljen/a
rece:


W2k here. Tried fdisk that came with w98, but no go. Someone sugested

that I get an updated one from M$. Still have to try.


Ok. That's a good question.
First: speed. NTFS is so slow. Ever tried to open a folder with many
sub folders? With a 7200rpm drive I have to wait around 40s (or more)
for a folder with 1000 subfolders. On an nonfragmented file system.
DAMN. FAT32 of course opens it instantly.

You might want to find out what's wrong with your system. Just for
hohos I just made 1000 subfolders in a folder and it opened instantly on
an NTFS drive. If it's taking 40 seconds on yours there's something
else going on.

Second: Reliability. I still don't trust M$ and NTFS. When a partition

dies, it's dead. Especialy nowdays, when HDD quality, hey what quality

? Yeah HDD die these days preatty much reguraly. Just in the pas few

months 2 drives dided on me. No w2k/xp had them even listed or wanted
to do anything with them.

But in pure dos and w98 I could access the drives just fine. Partition

Magic just said that there was an error with the drives (no hint about

the kind of the error though). IBM infotool (quite usefull) said the
same. Ghost crashed upond accessing the drives Spinrite also (so
much for writing in assembler Scandisk in w98 also crashed, or just

hanged, can't remember.

NTFS is less likely to lose data than is FAT32. If your drive dies it
dies. The solution to that is RAID, not struggling to recover data
using DOS or Windows 98.

As for drives dying pretty much regularly, again, find out what's wrong
with your system. I have dozens of drives going 24/7 and haven't had a
single spontaneous drive failure in the past two years (I did drop one a
while back and managed to short out another one, but that's my fault and
not a reliability issue) and the drive that failed two years ago was
something like 5 years old at the time. Many of those drives, by the
way, are 75GXPs which some claim to have a design defect that makes
them inherently unreliable. On the other hand I have had drives report
that they were malfunctioning and when I investigated I found that there
were problems with the power supply or cooling which when corrected made
the problem go away.

But I still managed to back up in w98 to another drive. If I had NTFS
i would have 240gb less data to worry about.
W2k/xp just don't tolerate errors with HW.

That's enough for me to stick to FAT32.

But still I'd like to use NTFS for features like hard-links. Damn it
would make my life so much easier. It would be a breeze to sor all
that data. But NTFS is still far from mature unix filesystems...

So use Unix--nothing keeps you from accessing Unix drives from a Windows
box and with gigabit ethernet as cheap as it is there shouldn't be much
of a performance penalty.

--

Professor: Now, be careful, Fry. And if you kill anyone, make sure
to eat their heart to gain their courage. Their rich tasty courage.


_/zombie [INH]\_

 

[Eric Gisin]

The Win XP/ME boot disk will create large FAT32s, just ignore the partition
size reported by fdisk, it is off by 64GB.

There are alternatives to MS fdisk - freedos fdisk and ranish partition
manager.

| > Which version of Windows? Win2k/XP will not CREATE FAT32 partitions over
| > 32G. They want you to use NTFS instead. They will use one created by other
| > software. If you know how, you could probably manually create the
| > partition table if needed. Or maybe a Win98 boot floppy's FDISK might
| > create one?
|
| W2k here. Tried fdisk that came with w98, but no go. Someone sugested
| that I get an updated one from M$. Still have to try.
|

 

[J.Clarke]

Jednom davno, ne znam vise kad, J.Clarke duboko zamisljen/a rece:


Dunno. I gots 100gb in those foders.

I tried copying 50 gig into my 1000 folders and it had no effect.

And all the people I know also report slowness with NTFS. And I also
read about it on the net.



Yeah, I know. I was thinking to set up RAID 1 or 5 somewhere later
this year.


Heh, I wish it would be like that. I sell HW for living so I have a
good pic about HDD reliability. OK, almost all IBM get back for
warranty (last year), but I also know people which never had any
problems with IBM. Over this summer 10 Maxtors diesd on me. Now I'm
moving to Seagate, it's slowest but seems most reliable.

There's an old adage in electronics service--when you find something
broken find out why it broke. Any time you find a dead drive, check
cooling and check power supply voltages, and watch them for a
while--I've seen power supplies that look fine and all of a sudden for
some reason one of the voltages drops out of spec for a few minutes and
then goes back into spec. And I've seen drives misbehave because of
that.

I was thinking something along those lines, maybe not *nix, but
definitly a dedicated box as a file server. I know that gigabit should

have the throughoutput but I'am afraid that latency will make it to
slow Will see.

Really depends more on the server for most situations. Find a Novell
authorized reseller and see if you can get a 5-user Netware Small
Business Suite out of him--the 5 user is free, but he can charge you for
the installation and whatnot. (Incidentally, you'll see people
claim that Novell is Linux underneath--that may be coming in a
future release of Netware but the current release is still 100%
Novell-developed) I've got over 217,000 files and directories on one
drive on my server and double clicking from 2K opens it instantly.
That's with 5400 RPM drives in the server and using 100VG, not 1000T.

--

Professor: Now, be careful, Fry. And if you kill anyone, make sure
to eat their heart to gain their courage. Their rich tasty courage.


_/zombie [INH]\_

 

[zombie [inh]]

Jednom davno, ne znam vise kad, J.Clarke duboko zamisljen/a rece:

You might want to find out what's wrong with your system. Just for
hohos I just made 1000 subfolders in a folder and it opened instantly on
an NTFS drive. If it's taking 40 seconds on yours there's something
else going on.

Dunno. I gots 100gb in those foders.

And all the people I know also report slowness with NTFS. And I also
read about it on the net.

NTFS is less likely to lose data than is FAT32. If your drive dies it
dies. The solution to that is RAID, not struggling to recover data
using DOS or Windows 98.

Yeah, I know. I was thinking to set up RAID 1 or 5 somewhere later this
year.

As for drives dying pretty much regularly, again, find out what's wrong
with your system. I have dozens of drives going 24/7 and haven't had a
single spontaneous drive failure in the past two years (I did drop one a

Heh, I wish it would be like that. I sell HW for living so I have a good
pic about HDD reliability. OK, almost all IBM get back for warranty
(last year), but I also know people which never had any problems with
IBM. Over this summer 10 Maxtors diesd on me. Now I'm moving to Seagate,
it's slowest but seems most reliable.

So use Unix--nothing keeps you from accessing Unix drives from a Windows
box and with gigabit ethernet as cheap as it is there shouldn't be much
of a performance penalty.

I was thinking something along those lines, maybe not *nix, but
definitly a dedicated box as a file server. I know that gigabit should
have the throughoutput but I'am afraid that latency will make it to slow
Will see.

--

Professor: Now, be careful, Fry. And if you kill anyone, make sure
to eat their heart to gain their courage. Their rich tasty courage.


_/zombie [INH]\_