Sunday 21 June 2009

Formatting a hard drive > 32Gb in FAT32

It shits me no end, to think that even now, FAT32 is the best that we
have, in terms of a near-universal file system. FAT32 is good enough,
except for those cases where you have >4Gb files. This will probably
happen more often, now that Virtual Machines are becoming more normal,
and people are dealing with BlueRay extracted media files and DVD ISO
files.

I got a new LG 500Gb portable drive, and now have to format it for use
with my WD TV HD Media Player. It's formatted NTFS by default, but I
have a Mac, so I can't write to the damn thin without installing
something like NTFS-3G, which *should* be stable enough these days,
but I've no experience with it, so I'll do more research before going
NTFS on my external drives. I'll just keep my virtual machines on my
local drive for now. (they're going to be faster that way anyway)

For large drives, previously I've had to go through crap like creating
a small partition because Windows format command only supports drives
up to 32Gb for FAT32, formatting in FAT32, and then expanding the
partition using PartitionMagic.

Someone has written a free utility to format a large drive quickly in
FAT32. Incredible speed - formatted my 500Gb drive in seconds!

http://www.crapcontrol.com/content.php?article.14

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