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I have about 400 GB worth of spare hard drives laying around, so I decided to pick up a Thermaltake USB2 HD enclosure and stick one of my old ATA drives in it. So far no problem, but when I try to partition it, I discover that formatting fails unless I hold the partitions to less than 32GB in size. Does anyone know why this might be the case?

Windows 2000 and XP will (if I remember right) refuse to create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB.

Some hard drives have jumper settings which when enabled only show 32GB for compatibility purposes, although that doesn't seem to be what you're seeing.

If you're trying to make a FAT32 partition in a non-Windows environment and running into this, you might try seeing about manually increasing the cluster size to 32KB.

I realize my perspective's a bit limited by my experience here but hopefully this helps.

Uraniun235 wrote:Windows 2000 and XP will (if I remember right) refuse to create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB.

Why would they do that?

Some hard drives have jumper settings which when enabled only show 32GB for compatibility purposes, although that doesn't seem to be what you're seeing.

If you're trying to make a FAT32 partition in a non-Windows environment and running into this, you might try seeing about manually increasing the cluster size to 32KB.

I realize my perspective's a bit limited by my experience here but hopefully this helps.

I was trying to make an NTFS partition, and it wouldn't do it. I ended up making a 32GB FAT32 partition and then deciding that I'd better find out what the problem is.

Darth Wong wrote:

Uraniun235 wrote:Windows 2000 and XP will (if I remember right) refuse to create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB.

Why would they do that?

Probably to promote NTFS, and also because 32KB clusters aren't terribly efficient; there could be a significant amount of wasted hard drive space. FAT32 also doesn't allow for individual files bigger than 4GB, if I remember right.

I would guess that fragmentation might become a significant concern on very large FAT32 partitions as well (not saying that they'd become more fragmented than smaller partitions, but that defragging a big partition could take a long time), although I can't say for certain.

I was trying to make an NTFS partition, and it wouldn't do it. I ended up making a 32GB FAT32 partition and then deciding that I'd better find out what the problem is.

That's really odd that it refused to make an NTFS partition. I don't know why that would happen.

Have you tried doing this on any other computers or operating systems? If you're trying it on Win2K, for example, you might try it with XP, which probably has better support for external drives. There are also third-party utilities out there which can create NTFS partitions although I don't know if they'd pick up USB-attached hard drives.

If none of your computers will make an NTFS partition on this drive then you could try attaching the hard drive to an IDE cable and seeing if you can format it then.

While I'm nowhere near a hardware pro, what's the size of the drive itself? Is it the case that this is one of those which requires some sort of physical add-on for full functionality? (i.e. in the way that one of mine came with a "free" PCI "Ultra ATA" card that was supposed to break the 137GB limit.)

Uranium235, I think that you're right about a 4GB limit on FAT32.

Darth Wong wrote: Why would they do that?

I don't know, it seems they wanted to purposely limit FAT32 use but they don't offer much rational for why they did it. There isn't a 32GB limit to a FAT32 drive, just to Windows creating a partition larger than 32GB.

Windows 2000
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/184006

Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463/EN-US/

Not sure what problem you are running into, it doesn't sound like a jumper issue or a file system problem since NTFS fails as well.

It's a pretty weird problem. The drive itself is a 100GB unit, and it's not as if it can't access the higher-numbered cylinders of the drive because I was able to make three separate 32GB partitions, thus using up the whole drive. But it won't let me make a single 100GB partition.

Linux often handles external drives better than Windows for whatever reason (occasionally have to repartition an external HDD under Linux since Windows won't see it, even though the partitions are there and files are perfectly readable). Anyway, there's a mkntfs under Linux. Also, there's that new (safe) userspace Linux ntfs driver, so you really don't have a reason to use FAT32 anymore except to use the HDD w/ Macs or Win9x

What tools have you attempted to use so far to do the formating?

TrailerParkJawa wrote:

Darth Wong wrote: Why would they do that?

I don't know, it seems they wanted to purposely limit FAT32 use but they don't offer much rational for why they did it. There isn't a 32GB limit to a FAT32 drive, just to Windows creating a partition larger than 32GB.

Windows 2000
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/184006

Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463/EN-US/

Not sure what problem you are running into, it doesn't sound like a jumper issue or a file system problem since NTFS fails as well.

Depends on how cynical you're feeling. I suppose an argument could be made for Microsoft wanting to restrict interoperability with other systems. I'm inclined to suspect that the people who made the decision were doing it more out of a desire to push people towards using NTFS over FAT32.

Also, like I said, at 32KB per cluster you start running into some significant space waste; for example, if you've got a file that's 33KB, it'll take up 64KB because of the cluster size.

Microsoft has been trying to kill FAT32 on large hard drives due to its general unreliability and inefficiency. It just isn't a very good filesystem and is only used because its so simple.

Darth Wong wrote:I was trying to make an NTFS partition, and it wouldn't do it. I ended up making a 32GB FAT32 partition and then deciding that I'd better find out what the problem is.

If you were doing a quick-format (a format taking seconds rather than tens of minutes), the problem might be the drive being partially bad.

Even a quick NTFS format tries writing much more data to the drive than a quick FAT32 format. I have seen the latter succeed on some bad drives when the former does not.

Unless you already did this, it would be best for you to test the old drive by doing a regular, non-quick FAT32 format on each part. Such a format with error-checking would take a hour or so in total, with you able to see if it gets stuck at under 100% completion.

If the drive is good, you could consider using a free program available for download on the web that bypasses the Windows XP 32GB FAT32 limit, as such works in my experience.

Update: it turns out that the problem was a BIOS setting. It seems that the "Auto" mass-storage option doesn't work for shit, and I had to set it to "Hard Disk" so that it would know what it was dealing with. After making the BIOS change, I had no problem partitioning and formatting it as either FAT32 or NTFS.