fat32 Question...

[Bry Paula Melvin]

On Wednesday 14 February 2007 01:41, Priyadarsan Roy wrote:
>  Kaj Haulrich wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 February 2007 22:31, Chris wrote:
>
> So, I recently started to use Kubuntu on a dualboot with my XP
> drive.
>
> I would REALLY like to remove just about everything but WoW from
> my XP drive and run from Kubuntu for the most part, but I am
> still stuck with my media on my windows drive...
>
> I wanted to get an external to store everything, and was
> wondering if linux could safely write to say a fat32 drive? If I
> could have a drive able to be edited by both linux and windows,
> my problems would be over and I could, say, synch my ipod through
> Amarok instead of stupid iTunes. I mean, I may be able to now,
> since amarok sees all my music files, but I am guessing the path
> name would have changed and so I would probably end up
> accidentally wiping the ipod. Not something I am willing to do
> yet ;)
>
>
> I use an external hard drive (Maxtor) 80GB for exactly that.  It
> holds 3 FAT32 partitions and works flawlessly.  I don't know if the
> 32GB limit still is necessary, but some sources claim that Winders
> can't allocate more than that. So, just in case...
>
> Kaj Haulrich.
>
>  I have an external disk of 80 GB as a single partition with FAT32. So I
> guess there is no problem till 80 GB.
>
>  Regards,
>  PD
>
>   
I don't remember all the details....but fat 32 limitations were ISTR 32 64 and 
137 mb partitions depending on windows version. I am not sure of fdisk 
limitations however, just formatting. as we have partitioned with either OS/2 
or Linux since w98 came out without support for some of our scanning 
equipment. 

fat 32 partitions that are larger waste a lot of space due to structure eg 
minimum space used for a file etc. So you might want to have smaller 
partitions 32-64 mb and assign them to different mount points in linux and so 
forth.

also I think utf-8 use with fat makes them case sensitive for file names ISTR 
so using linux to write a win executable can sometimes cause windows/fake 
windows to not find an executable...something to be careful of...ran into 
this using crossover.

Bryann