Adventures in Filesystem Formatting

Just this past week my Windows XP install crashed, mainly due to my changing hardware and not reinstalling (hey I stretched it for 5 months!).

So fast forward to last thursday and guess what? Windows wouldn't start. So I figured I'd do a quick format and reinstall windows. Things didn't quite go as I planned but I'll leave thattravesty for another time.

I own an external 160GB hard drive which I connect to my computr via Firewire. Since I use that drive to move large files and my music library around I must stick to filesystem which can be mounted on machines running many flavours of OSes.

My pick, for the most part has been FAT32.

Before you start detailing superiority details of yoru favourite filesystem, please note that while most modern filesystems are superior to FAT, few have readily available drivers or kernel extensions for other OSes, so taking this into consideration and the fact that most OSes format to FAT it's a simple choice.

However you'd expect that the platform that spawned FAT would not cripple it's own offering and try and force you to a more closed alternative, and that's exactly what windows does.

Theoretically, FAT32 can support partitions up to 2 Terabytes in size, yet the format tool in windows only allows you to format up to 32 GB and if you need to go higher it almost forces you to go the NTFS way which can only be read but not written to in most other systems.

I found a command prompt tool that did the jo, however, and I'd like to share with you all that with a tool you can get here I was able to format my large drive to something many machines can use.

I really hate crippled software.