Don't Exceed 32GB Partition with FAT32!

[Donald Darden]

If you look for information on the web concerning maximum partition sizes for FAT32 or other partition structures, you would know to avoid this problem in the first place.  But saying 32GB, then knowing exactly what is meant by 32GB are two different things.  In my case, I went slightly beyond the limit by accident, and when the format and continued use of the partiton showed no discernible problems, I thought I was safe.

But suddenly I was having trouble getting some file updates burned to a backup CD, and could not get the CD to appear properly.  Fussing with this, I suddenly experienced a blue screen of death.  That forced a reboot, further blue screens of death when I repeated my efforts, then suddenly my reboot efforts were dying with blue screens of death as well.  I tried repairing and reinstalling Windows, even tried restoring from a backup, but on the first reboot the system would die again.  I had trouble imagining what the problem could be.  I did know that I was getting pretty close to a full partition when this took place, but surely the restore from a backup should have dealt with that.  So what could be wrong?

I finally worked it out in my head that the FAT32 partition must be corrupted, but since partition checks all came up clean, it must be a table wrap problem.  That is, even though there appeared to be some drive space left, the addressing scheme with 32 bits was actually wrapping back to a previously assigned and used portion of the drive.  By writing to the wrong portion of the drive, I had accidently caused the drive to corrupt itself.  Why this condition persisted in the face of a restore from a backup was a mystery, but I could attack the problem on that basis.

I did another restore from backup, then used my Windows install disks to convert the partiton to NTFS.  I was committed to installing Windows again at that point, but aborted after the conversion, only that was inadequate.  Then I attempted a repair, only that did not work either,  I tried a restore from backup where I just copied all files over, this meaning copying from a FAT32 archive to a NTFS volume, which took twice as long, but again the system would not boot.  I finally gave up and reinstalled Windows while keeping the drive contents intact.  That of course meant reinstalling all applications that needed to be included in the Registry in order to be accessible.

I don't know if the Registry is the worse single thing about Windows or not, but controls on it are so rudimentary that it can completely stifles efforts to deal with it adequately.  Every application is free to make whatever additions it chooses, and few applications bother to remove what got installed when you delete the software later.

Tools have been devised to rut out broken links and other discrepancies in the Registry, but that is only a part of the overall problem.  It's the Registry that generally determines whether applications need to be reinstalled before being usable, and prevent applications from migrating to new PCs from old.  You have no way to locate and export all the keys related to a specific application, although if you could, you could then import those keys for use under a different version of Windows or on a different PC, or use them to restore an application after having to reinstall Windows.

You cannot migrate applications from one partition to another, because each is hardcoded to the drive letter and path that was used when the application was first installed, and these become embedded in the Registry as well.  You have no tool for walking the Registry and verifying paths and drive letters, then searching for missing apps and correcting the Registry if the application was moved.   If you have several installs of Windows, as I do, so that I can still get into my PC if one crashes, you cannot share a single install of an application between them, because that application has to be reinstalled again and again, just to make the necessary Registry entries under each separate install of Windows.

It's my thought that if anybody wants to make the next killer utility for Windows, it will be a tool that can do all these things and more, so that we can be freed from the tyranny of an OS that limits the mobility of our applications and forces us to endure the pain of living with a failing OS rather than simply resort to a clean reinstall of the OS and immediate continuance with our previously installed suites of applications and datasets.  Perhaps that same tool can allow us to image just the fully installed OS with updates, then bring it back to the same point in time whenever we so desire, rather than having to install from scratch and go through countless updates and reboots just to catch up with all the bug fixes that M$ has released over time.  .

[Scott Hauser]

If you look for information on the web concerning maximum partition sizes for FAT32 or other partition structures, you would know to avoid this problem in the first place.  But saying 32GB, then knowing exactly what is meant by 32GB are two different things.  In my case, I went slightly beyond the limit by accident, and when the format and continued use of the partiton showed no discernible problems, I thought I was safe.

Does this only apply to FAT32 or is NTFS included in this? I have religiously avoided NTFS and opted for FAT32 because NTFS is so propriatary to MS. Even then, it irritates me to be forced to boot to Win 2K or XP to shuttle files to and  from my FAT32 to FAT16 partitions.    The reason I am asking is our local computer store is selling his base systems with 40GB drives and XP. The 40GB system comes with a single partition.. I have had no trouble with mine, but then I donated half the drive space to Ubuntu 6.06.  I suspect the original partition is NTFS. But this might explain some of the mysterious issues my mother's best friend has had on her new computer--which immediately becomes part of my "sonny do list"... 

I use Acronis True Image and Disk Director and have been very satisfied with them. My version is almost 5 years old and is limited with the new huge drives. I am thinking of upgrading to the latest versions because they offer better support for these drives. IIRC, the new DiskDirector has very few restrictions on the number of primary partitions you can create. These two programs have saved me so much grief in the last 5 years that I am still amazed.

[Donald Darden]

I stayed with FAT32 partitions for the longest time because the following OSes all share compatibility with it:  DOS, all versions of Windows, and Linux.  Even when I had limited disk space, I usually had a dual install of Windows 98 and Windows 2k Pro on the same machine.  Back then NTFS was limited to Windows 2k/XP, and more recently supported by Vista.  But Ubuntu and other Linux distros now offer some support for NTFS as well, and you can even find drivers that let DOS have at least read access to NTFS partitions.

FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32 partitions reflect the number of bits used in addressing the hard drive.  Consequently, each represents a significant increase in capacity over the previous one.  But with NTFS, a much more sophisticated manner of ensuring content and recovery was developed, one that Microsoft guarded as being proprietary.  I assume that either the patent rights have run out, or they have relinquished some degree of ownership, as it is now more common support for NTFS in competing OSes.  I read that NTFS will support up to 2 Terabytes on a single partition, so its future is not at risk at the moment.

Ubuntu makes it easy to read and write to NTFS volumes, but you probably need to tweak the properties of the device, since the default mode is read only.  As to Windows 98, I gave it up, since updates to Windows 2K and XP have made them far more stable, and I now support three separate installs of Windows 2K instead of the original 98 & 2K setup I once favored.

There are flavors of Linux that can be installed within Windows, and Linux can be installed in a Virtual Machine environment on top of Windows (and the other way around), and you can create a multii-boot PC with several partitons that let you boot to any OS that you chose to install on it.  Since you can download and install a program called EXT2 onto Windows 2K or XP (and possibly Vista), you can use it to access any Linux partitions set up as EXT2 or EXT3, and with Linux able to access NTFS partitons, you have the ability to move data freely between partitions associated with different operating systems and applications.

You can even network between the different OSes if you can access more than one at a time (such as from within a VM environment).  The thing is, you can download and play with all these options on your current PC, but you have to have enough RAM (I found 1 GB to be adequate), and hard drive space to support your appetite for downloads and installs (I'm currently up to 480 GB, split between two hard drives/9 partitons).  And above all, you need a fast internet connection to support the many downloads and updates involved, or you will be spinning your wheels and getting no traction for the most part.

[Marco Pontello]

I read that NTFS will support up to 2 Terabytes on a single partition, so its future is not at risk at the moment.

Luckyly is much more than then. It seems such a big size but, on a second thinking, we already have HDDs around of 1TB, so a 2TB limit would be hit probably within the year!

The 2TB is more a limit of the "old style" Master Boot Record, and thuse relate only on "old style" and bootable NTFS partitions.
Using EFI's GUID Partition Tables / dynamic volumes - or for any non bootable NTFS partition - the limits are more future proof: from 16TB to 256TB, depending on cluster size, as for current implementations.

That's at least what I get from a quick look on MSDN & Wikipedia.

Bye!

[Donald Darden]

Having got everything working just right, including 3 installs of Windows 2K, Three installs of Ubuntu, three installs of VirtualBox on Ubuntu, one install of VirtualBox on top of Windows, and three implementations of Windows as VMs, with the bonus of having IncrediMail now working on six partitions and yet sharing only one set of folders and files, I decided that there was just one more thing I needed to do:  Convert my remaining three FAT32 partitions (Drives E, F, and G) to NTFS to ward of future problems.  I used my old copy of PartitonMagic 8 for this - it's unable to recognize the really large drives correctly, but for up to 120 GB, it does well enough.  I converted one, made sure it could still boot up afterwards, then converted the remaining two.

Then the unpleasant surprise:  When I boot into Ubuntu now, the drives that were FAT32 are no longer recognized.  I know it's just a configuration problem in Ubuntu, but I am not sure how to fix it.  I could just reinstall Ubuntu, but there is a lot of steps to go through for that.  I could leave it the way it is, but I would rather take care of it.  I guess I will see if any searches will produce results, but this is probably not the type of problem many people would experience.  I tried recovery mode with Ubuntu, but that had no impact.  I would seem beneficial if recovery mode scanned for hardware changes, but it did not happen.

Anyway, I am getting closer to what I have decided I want my fully configured PC to be set up as. 

[Scott Hauser]

Donald,

I don't recall if Linux can see a ntfs partition to mount it. Yet the linux partition utility can see it to repartition and format for a linux install. Perhaps this will be of help.

This tutorial will show you how to mount NTFS and FAT partitions in ubuntu

For mounting TFS we are going to use one small tool called NTFS-3G this is very powerfull and simple tool

I am quoting from:

http://www.debianadmin.com/mount-your-widows-partitions-and-make-it-readwritable-in-ubuntu.html