Monday, 2006-02-20

Formatting FAT32 under Windows XP

Apparently you can’t format volumes larger than 32GB in FAT32 under WinXP. Anything larger will have to use NTFS. I’ve got a largish drive in a USB-connected enclosure that I’d like to use under Linux, so NTFS was out. As far as I know, the Linux support for it is still experimental.

Well, as the good book says, Google, and ye shall find. The first suggestions from MS was to boot into Win98/ME and use their FORMAT command to do this. This is akin to performing brain surgery with a butter knife dipped in pus.

But I also found Jens-Uwe Mager’s Windows port of the Linux command mkdosfs that worked like a charm.

So now I’m backing up the MP3’s on this machine. Can life get much better?