[ale] Disk Format Question - Best choice for 500 Gig?
Preston Boyington
preston.lists at gmail.com
Mon Mar 12 16:43:08 EDT 2007
Thompson Freeman wrote:
<snipped>
> I've got a 500 Gig hard disk...I
> expect the best format for the hard disk is a fat/msdos
> type system, and I think I want the fat32 type.
>
most likely you will wind up with FAT32. it is supported by virtually
all major operating systems (although purists will probably need a
kernel patch). also it will handle your disk size without a problem.
that said, i have had (on a couple of occasions) my FAT32 partition to
go nuts when connected to various WinXP machines. quite literally i had
to format the partition in order to use it again. nothing easily
recovered the data and i noticed that it has mainly happened with SP1.
i believe it had more to do with the USB enclosure losing sync and
then coming online again and corrupting the partition. anyway, now i
don't plug it into anyone else's port (I practice safe sync).
i did notice that my ext2 partition didn't give any trouble. so now i
have the drive mostly formatted ext2 and i keep a small fat32 partition
with the Ext2IFS program to run when i am on XP machines.
so far no problems, but that wouldn't be practical for most people.
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