Partitions in FAT32 on XP

[Sphinx]

Alright, long story short, my Windoze partition got hosed yesterday while trying to install Gentoo.

I reinstalled XP this morning on a 15 gig partition. I've got another 15G for gentoo. I want the remaining 50 odd gigs for data storage that can be accessed by either OS. That means I want it in FAT32. However, XP won't let me format anything bigger than 32 gigs as FAT32, it insists on NTFS.

What do I do?

[Snow Dog]

Copied from elsewhere;

Size Limitations in NTFS and FAT File Systems

Each file system supports a maximum volume size, file size, and number of files per volume. Because FAT16 and FAT32 volumes are limited to 4 GB and 32 GB respectively, you must use NTFS to create volumes larger than 32 GB. If you use FAT16 or FAT32 in computers that start multiple operating systems, you must note the following size limitations:

* FAT volumes smaller than 16 MB are formatted as FAT12.
* FAT16 volumes larger than 2 GB are not accessible from computers running MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, and many other operating systems. This limitation occurs because these operating systems do not support cluster sizes larger than 32 KB, which results in the 2 GB limit.
* In theory, FAT32 volumes can be about 8 terabytes; however, the maximum FAT32 volume size that Windows XP Professional can format is 32 GB. Therefore, you must use NTFS to format volumes larger than 32 GB. However, Windows XP Professional can read and write to larger FAT32 volumes formatted by other operating systems.
* If you create multidisk volumes such as spanned or striped volumes, the amount of space used on each disk is applied to the total size of the volume. Therefore, to create a multidisk volume that is larger than 32 GB, you must use NTFS.

[Snow Dog]

And more:
This "cannot Format more than 32GB" behavior is by design, as Microsoft recommends using the NTFS file system for partitions greater than 32GB. One reason for this is: as a FAT32 partition goes beyond 32GB, the cluster size that is used jumps from 16K to 32K, thus "wasting" far more drive space when small files are stored.

[Sphinx]

Yeah, I knew that.

I just formatted it as NTFS, as relying on my external drive as my only data copy makes me deeply uneasy. Luckily, I only lost some recent music files, nothing critical.

PartitionMagic will see some use on Monday.

[real9999]

Use NTFS and recompile your kernel or use a module for NTFS support. I personally hate dual booting; so I don't dual boot any of my machines. On my laptop running XP, I run a few Fedora images inside VMware. It works fine for my needs.