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Corruption on shared FAT32 volume


jfn
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Hi all,

 

I've been using XP and OS X on separate partitions with a shared FAT32 partition in between them. This has been working great for two months now. But recently I've started to have problems with corrupted files on the shared partition. I've tried ripping a cd in iTunes under OS X several times. OS X can play the ripped tracks fine, but in XP, the directories and files it created are corrupt (and the folders appear to be filled with several nonsense files/folders). Yesterday an important file I had was corrupted and unreadable (and its size was misreported as tiny), though I luckily had a backup. I opened an Excel document in XP fine just now, but it won't let me save it because it is suddenly corrupt (now I can't open it from the disk again, either).

 

Any idea what is going on? Does this seem like an OS issue, or is my hard drive perhaps failing? Very scary stuff here... time to back up again.

 

Thanks!

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  • 4 weeks later...

I should add that I think I figured out the cause of this problem... downloading a >4gb torrent onto a FAT32 volume. I'm pretty sure that was the issue. Luckily I was able to delete all the corrupted files and the problem hasn't resurfaced. But the 4gb file limit on FAT32 partitions wasn't detected and I suspect that data was written past the legal end of the file, or something.

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That sounds like a good idea. It would be nice to have everything on HFS+ partitions so i can search them with spotlight and have >4gb files. Do you need to use the Macdrive interface to deal with files on the HFS partitions, or can you start up the program and then use the Windows file interface (and Windows programs) normally, and they'll be able to access the mounted drive as if it were NTFS? Is there a performance penalty?

 

And yes, it does work now... I recovered from another location the files that had been corrupted, ran chkdsk and such, and now it's okay. Phew.

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