Constant Flux

Why I Use FAT32 Even Though It Sucks

After I bought my 1.5TB drive, I decided to put my 300GB drive into an external enclosure for some portable storage.

I wanted the drive to be in FAT32 format so that I can both read AND write it from Linux and Windows. NTFS is usually only readable from Linux. The large clusters are inefficient for such a large drive, but I’m willing to give up that space for a more versatile storage device.

Windows XP won’t let me format such a large drive as FAT32, insisting instead on NTFS. It’s a good thing that mkdosfs has been ported to Windows, because this utility allowed me to format a drive larger than 32GB as FAT32. Once again, the twin powers of GNU/Linux and Open Source have triumphed!

I named it Gamera.

This was written by Gustav Bertram. Posted on Wednesday, January 28, 2009, at 12:16. Filed under Computing, Hacking. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

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Gustav Bertram is a computer scientist wannabe. He theorizes about autodidacticism, free culture, information economics, intelligence amplification, computer science and technology. Constant Flux is his future hacking blog.

He also writes Otakumono, which is his local geek culture blog.

He lives in Randburg, Gauteng, South Africa, and is currently employed as a software developer. For more information, see his Homepage.
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Why I Use FAT32 Even Though It Sucks

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