[HowTo] Use Fat32 HDs of 32GB+ in OS X and WindowsXP

[Simania_NL]

A few good tips to stop the issues of moving hard drives between Macs and Windows computers:

 

The FAT32 disk format supports drives up to 2 terabytes in size. The easiest ways to parition/format a FAT32 drive larger than 32Gbytes are:

1. 1 Under Mac OS X using Disk Utility to format the drive as misleadingly named "MS-DOS File System". This limits you to one partition. If the drive is less than 2Gbytes in size, you will get a FAT16-formatted drive; otherwise you get a FAT32-formatted drive. This works for drives larger than 32 Gbytes.
   
2. 2 Under Windows XP, using the Disk Management snap-in allows you to format FAT32 drivers larger than 32 Gbytes.
   
3. 3 Under free/open source OSes with their disk partitioning tools.
   

The one limitation to keep in mind if you use FAT32 as a common format: You cannot create a file larger than (2^32)-1 bytes (this is one byte less than 4 GB) on a FAT32 partition. And Microsoft Windows 2000 only supports FAT32 partitions up to a size of 32 GB. For more details see these Microsoft KBs Description of FAT32 File System in Windows XP Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;EN-US;310525

 

Simply format the drive using a Mac. Mac OS X can format a disk in the FAT32 format, and it imposes no artificial limits the way Windows XP does. (I believe this works under OS 9, too.) Of course, this only works for external drives... but that's exactly what we're talking about here, yes?

I wanted to warn people that I have seen MacDrive 5 trash several drives and Windows installations... not the Mac drives, but the Windows drives where it was running from. This happened in a couple of my machines and a couple of my friends' machines running Windows XP and 2000. Even if it's slower networking is the safer way to go.

You can use the DrivePC utility in the Intech SpeedTools package to format and partition FAT32 volumes on the Mac without the annoying 32GB FAT32 partition size limit in Windows XP. Also, Intech says that they do a better job of FAT32 formatting than Apple does.

SubRosaSoft has FileSalvage , which claims to do "file system independent" data recovery for several file types. I haven't tried this, but it could be worth a look.

 

The current release of SP2 for Microsoft Windows XP has introduced a problem with 1394b devices. The drivers installed by SP2 limit the performance of a 1394b host controller (PCI card) and its connected devices to only 100Mbs (S100) speeds. More specific information on this problem can be found by doing a search on "XP+SP2+1394b" on Yahoo and Google.

While this is a Windows-specific problem, it can have an indirect impact on Mac users who move a 1394b drive enclosure with a drive formatted as FAT32 (or NTFS) between their Mac and Windows systems. Mac users will get full performance when connected to the 1394b port on the Mac computer, but will notice a serious decrease in performance when the drive is connected to their WinXP/SP2 machine.

Both Initio and Oxford have released firmware patches to over come this problem. If you are using an Initio 2430 based 1394b enclosure or an Oxford 912 or 922 based 1394b enclosure and you are moving your drive back and forth between your Mac and your WinXP/SP2 machine, you should contact the vendor you purchased the 1394b enclosure from and get the firmware patch and apply it.

If you are not moving drives between Macs and Windows machine, you do not need the patch as it will have no impact on your Mac-based devices.

 

Good Luck,

Rgds Simania

this article is edited from a other source

[sandmanfvrga]

Quick note here. I had a FAT32 50 gig partition that I was using to share with XP and Linux, then went OSX86. Well when I booted OSX, it didn't see the partition. Went back into Windows and used Partition Magic (any partition software will work) and then I changed the partition to 30 gigs. Booted into OSX and bingo, the partition showed up AND the other smal NTFS partition on the same drive showed up to. Then I went into Disk Utility in OSX and decided to get rid of the small partition and tried making the FAT32 partition 50 gigs again, it worked. So to those that have large Fat32 storage partitions (larger than 32 gig) and want OSX to see them, you need to resize them first or if you have DVD-RW capabilities just backup your data (should anyway) and then let OSX make you a large FAT32 (MS-DOS in the Disk Utiltiy as said above) and restore you data. Probably what Rgds said above, but it was very strange the WHOLE drive, both partitions, weren't visable till I resized the FAT32 partition.

[robdeans86]

Im considering a dual boot osx and vista (50gig partitions each) and having a 200gb fat32 partition for my documents, is this wise and am i likely to encounter any problems setting this up...?

I realise fat32 has a 4gb file limit but i have other ntfs drives which i will keep my larger files on.

Thanks for any help