At 01:37 PM 3/15/2005, Maurits van Rees wrote:
On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 02:36:24AM -0800, Ibrahim Mubarak wrote: > You might be right. I just tried to use an old 40 GB drive and format > it using windows, but I had no choice in the fs type. The only option > is NTFS, but I want it as FAT32. All this to be able to make a backup! I would expect that it is possible to choose FAT32 as file system. I remember having faced this problem some years ago. I remember that in the end I solved it. I don't remember how though. ;-) I may have even just solved it exactly the way you are trying to solve it now: with Linux.
I missed the middle of this thread where this question came in, so my apologies if this is the answer to the wrong question. But if what you are trying to do is format a drive in windows 2000 and make it FAT32, there's a pretty annoying feature that kicks in. There's a limit on the size it will allow you. It's nothing to do with a technical limitation of fat32, it's just to discourage you from using fat32 and go with ntfs instead. I forget if it's as low as 40 gb, but it might be. (The technical limitation on fat32 is hundreds of gb if not more.) In w2k, it will let you choose FAT32, and it will act like it's doing it, and then after much times goes by, it will fail and tell you the volume is too large. Why it doesn't tell you at the beginning I don't know. The behavior you describe, where you don't even have a choice of FAT32, could be their answer to this in windows xp, is that what you're using?
Anyway, as Maurits suggested, the answer is linux. If you use the linux commands to partition the drive and make the filesystem as fat32, it (a) goes way faster, and (b) lets you make it as big as you want. You mentioned using mkdosfs. I used mkfs.
-A