I've had issues before with this but, I pretty much forgot about it when I got my own laptop. It seems that the computers at my College Library (and possibly others as well) don't like it when an external drive is formatted as NTFS. Before when I used these computers frequently I ended up reformatting the drive using a virtual machine I'd set up shortly before hand. Thing is I had to reformat again and I didn't have my VM setup to hand the job. The Drive is more than 32GB so the built in methods for Microsoft refuse to work. I was wondering if there's any free, legal, and easy to use ways to reformat the drive to fat32 again without having to set up a whole new VM.
I realize that for all the trouble I'm spending on this message that I probably could have just set up a VM but, I'm hoping that this will inspire a change to eliminate the problem all together.
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on BlueSky
Do a google search for a program called "fat32format.exe"
It is very small & will format any size external hard disk from NTFS to Fat32.
I have several eg. 80Gb, 120GB & 320Gb, all at fat32.
Why? FAT32 is horribly slow, especially with volumes of that size.
Vintage!
is given when you have fat. It does not mean one should have XP or Vista on FAT32, this is not meant to be so , even possible.
But data and apps, particularly on external drive, NTFS is bad. If the drive was formated as regular drive by windows, it has the rights enabled. Thus it will work only with the particular windows user account it is meant to work with. It is not portable at all.
If it is formated by windows and during that procedure the drive is recognized by windows as removable (as flash drives are) then the nosecurity is applied during formating and the access rights are omited.
But NTFS formated drives are not allways easy to be accessed by other operating systems like linux, thought some drivers are meanwhile supplied to many distros there, but mostly with the warning use it on your own risk.
So if you want beable to retrieve your data everywhere, even after your main hard drive crashed, then store them on something what can be read more easy then NTFS file system.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
The convert utility will create an NTFS volume that has no concept of ownership. IIRC, it is also possible to change the owner of an NTFS volume to Everyone, effectively removing security features. There are ways around that problem, so it is not a reason to use an inferior filesystem.
In almost all cases, NTFS is a better choice for volumes of that size.
Vintage!
all bets on file ownership are off.
using the /nosecurity switch to convert does not disable security on the drive. It simply sets a permissive initial state.
Unless you regularly remember to re-apply that state, and to force-copy it down to all sub-items, you may get a nasty surprise when you go travelling and find that the file that you needed is suddenly barred from you.
Are you sure? I never had that problem. I used to regularly carry around a 320GB drive formatted with NTFS and I never once had problems being able to use the same FxP profile across 3 computers, having admin rights on only one of them.
Vintage!
I have a 500Gb and 2 250Gb portable HDDs, and an 8Gb flash drive, all formatted NTFS (need bigger than 4G files in all cases).
The Flash drive particularly I use every day at home and at work, it has all my mail, calendar, IM client, etc on it, and I use it to sync and transfer lots of documents back and forth.
About once every few months, one or other of the drives suddenly complains at one site that I don't have access to some folder deep into the drive, and, when I look into it (I have admin access at both places) I find that the Everyone ownership has magically transformed itself into the user account I log in as on one of the machines.
Not often, but often enough to be a potential problem.
those experiencies of yours are quite correct.
Since this is windows computers, rights can be transfered with some files, depending on how they were transfered. Once this happens, confusion will take place definitely.
On flash drives, this is often no issue, since all rights are not considered at first by windows. But one can, with some utils, format those too in strange way
On hard drives, well, one has to be carefull abt it, when windows considers this as volume belonging to the current user, it may copy rights with it, on next occassion it will decide that such drive is removable and here the confusion starts.
I had this problems on portable usb drives, connected one time as usb drive just to the usb bus of the pc, and next time as 2nd drive to the usb port of a NAS server, talking to it then either by ftp or mounting as normal drive. Works all nice as long as this is kept at home connected to the NAS. Then taken away, connected to some other pc after some months, the confusion was here. After those experiencies, all such drives are formated by fat32 and this solves all this surprises. And linux can read this too and the often reported slow speed of the fat32, well yes, but this calculations are done by processor, this might have been an issue some time ago, but today there more other things on the system making it slow then that. And the access to external hard drives with usb connection will be probably limited by the speed of the usb bus rather then the filesystem or even the way the controller in the hard drive works. Therefore for those portable or semi portable use, I collect all those IDE drives, there are still fine enough for that, no speed advanatage using here SATA.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Speed is not an issue.
Plug an NTFS disk into an older Fat computer and then try to run your programs. You cant even read the disk unless you install a special NTFS file reader program which sort of defeats the purpose of plugging in the disk in the first place.
It's like the people who say "but I have dot net - so all computers must have dot net" yeah right!
So you do it because you need to use such a system regularly? Or do you do it simply because there's a chance you may encounter one?
Vintage!
I have family & friends using all types of computers & file systems.
I don't embarass them or put them down for it or tell them to upgrade if they use an older Fat or Fat32 system, I just work with it when I have to help them out.
you can download the iso files of g-parted for example, burn to CD and you can the format what ever you want. Or any similar formating utils.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
the max filesystem size for fat32 is 2TB and fat16 is 2GB
Yes, but the tools supplied by MS intentionally refuse to create FAT32 volumes larger than 32GB.
If you want to know why, click here.
Vintage!
Another factor to keep in mind is that the maximum file size for fat32 is about 4gb. So, keep that in mind. For me, that means I cannot keep copies of DVD ISO's on my FAT32 drive.
What? No it isn't... my flash drive is 8gb and it works fine with FAT32. Besides, it came as a FAT32 parition.
I recommend just starting ubuntu linux and reformatting from there.
The maximum FILE size on a FAT32 drive is 4GB. The drive itself can be up to 2TB as FAT32.
Ed
I downloaded the file and will likely try it tonight.
Also, since this became more of a discussion than I'd honestly hoped I'll say this. I know that Fat32 is overall an inferior system but, public computers like the ones I'm setting this drive up for detect things quite differently than a personal computer because of the strange security methods they use. As someone said these computers just love to change file stats so that the proper user can't use them and that's why I must change the primary partition to use Fat32 (Note: I'm going to create multiple partitions but, only the first one that will be for Portable Apps will be in Fat32, the second partition that I'll use for Backups will be in NTFS because it can handle much larger files. The reason the primary partition will be the Portable Apps one is because sometimes public computers only recognize the first partition.)
sometimes public computers only recognize the first partition.
Not sure about Windows 7 but all versions of Windows that I'm aware of always recognize only the first partition on removeable devices unless a filter such as cfadisk.sys or dummydisk.sys has been manually installed by the owner.
Ed
Actually I have a portable 80GB usb hard drive that is partitioned into 2 drives, 32GB Fat32 and the rest NTFS.
It is seen as 2 Drives on All commuters I have used, and I have not installed any special programs or drivers.
Tim
Things have got to get better, they can't get worse, or can they?
For devices configured as fixed rather than removeable Windows sees all partitions. Your USB drive must be configured that way.
Ed
As far as I know I am in the same situation as the user you were replying to.
Tim
Things have got to get better, they can't get worse, or can they?
Not if you say always and he says sometimes. LOL
For the most part USB sticks are almost always configured as removeable but USB hard drives are more of a mixed bag. Not sure what drives the option.
Ed
I see, you thought he was talking about a Flash Drive/Stick.
I'm just going by what he said, he has a large usb hard drive that he wants to partition into 2 and he wants to make sure that the fat32 partition is first as "sometimes public computers only recognize the first partition". He did not say anything about designating it/them as Removable OR Fixed. From reading what he said, he just partitioned it.
Tim
Things have got to get better, they can't get worse, or can they?
but on the 'adaptor' or what ever way it is connected to the pc while formating it and also while using it.
Often portable hard drives, which bought with complete case and ready to be used behave similar like flash drives. They say to windows that they are removable. Then one has to try to reformat them so that they forget the romovable bit. There seem to be some around, which persist on to be removable, the build in controller passes that info to operating system and this is then bad. One can have only one partition then, it acts exactly as most flash sticks.
If the disk was bought as normal one and the adapter separately, well there are ways to format it. Some utils will refuse to format usb drives, since they are not sure if this is removable or not. Some utils will do it well, booting linux with gparted or similar is fine.
Windows itself will do all ops on the drive, but will insist on fat32 of max 32gb while creating the partition.
What I stopped do, is inserting the disk as normal disk into a pc and do the formating this way. This will create partitioning and formating according to the latest hype of MS, often volumes becoming not readable later by other OS or the mentioned confusions with writing rights will occur.
In recent times, I use for usb connected drives gparted CD, at work I have also the acronis disk doctor or how they call it. So I have on my 320gb part with fat32 for general data and backup and some part with generic formated NTFS where I could store larger files as dvd iso.
Since reasonable backup and imaging software works also with bootable linux, NTFS is no use for such things, the write operations on such partition are bound to be failure thus not usefull for backup ops.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland