[ale] FAT32 driver and big disk drives

[Jay Loden]

What file system are you using when you mount the FAT drive?

I had similar problems happen to me using a 256mb FAT32 thumb drive, until I started
mounting it as "mount -t vfat"

This was on slackware, but it may apply to your situation too.  Instead of mounting as
vfat, it mounted it automatically as some other format that was causing it read and
write incorrectly, and I got 0 byte files and the shell would tell me "file x does not
exist" when I would try to open manipulate files that I knew were written correctly.

Otherwise, there was a decent ext2 and ext3 driver for Windows I was using for a while
that seemed stable...I used it to read off my Linux partition onto windows, at least
up until I dumped Windows for good.

http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm

that's the homepage.  Otherwise, maybe you'll have luck with samba or something else.

Good luck!

-Jay


On Wed, November 24, 2004 2:57 pm, Greg Freemyer said:
> On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 14:36:02 -0500, Christopher Fowler
> <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> wrote:
>> Weird. When I try to format large partiions XP forces me into NTFS.  I
>> can not even select FAT32.
>>
>>
> That is an arbitrary XP limit.  M$ thinks it is a bad idea to have
> FAT32 filesystems bigger than 32GB, so they don't allow you to do
> it!!!
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkc_fil_tdrn.asp
>
> I also cannot format a large (250GB) FAT32 partition with
> PartitionMagic.  It will do at least 80GB, so I don't know its max.
>
> I'm using the Linux command "mkfs.msdos -F 32 /dev/hdc1" which seems
> to have no problem, but as I said my tape restores are not working
> reliably.  It takes a couple of hours to test anything, so I'm hoping
> for some more direction.
>
> FYI: I have not yet gotten cygwin to talk to my drive.  The command
> "tar -xvf /dev/st0" should work, but it is not. :(
>
> Greg
> --
> Greg Freemyer
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