Talk:File Allocation Table

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archive 1 (2004–2007)

[edit] Maximum FAT32 format in WinXP

Hey all. I dont have much experience in Win2k but I have, many times, formatted a 120GB drive with FAT32 in WinXP. It needs to be done from the Microsoft Management Console as far as I've seen, but it is possible.

Same here. I just used the FORMAT command on 250GB drive in fat32. Some of the confusion might be different front-ends: command-line, MMC drive manager, wizard? I also speculate that the restriction may have been lifted at some time (via updates), not per OS version. —Długosz (talk) 03:23, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Then again, it did not work! It was happily formatting, but I didn't want to wait 6 to 10 hours, so I broke out and did a /q format. It complained that the partition was too large. Would the non-quick format have complained after writing all the sectors?!

Meanwhile, in contrast to the report from the anonymous poster above, the MMC "Drive Manager" snap-in did not give any choice other than NTFS. I found [1] and worked on Vista. —Długosz (talk) 04:50, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Errors in file system information at ntfs.com

Tarun just changed the file size limits on FAT32 and FAT16 to 4 GiB − 2 bytes and 2 GiB respectively on the basis of this table (I assume) at ntfs.com. I've just verified that this is incorrect by creating a >2 GiB file on a FAT16 volume with 64K clusters and a 4 GiB − 1 byte file on a FAT32 volume, using WinXP Pro SP2. Here are some other mistakes I noticed, while I'm at it:

• Long file names on FAT12 aren't limited to 254 characters (verified).
• Long file names on FAT aren't limited to the "system character set", assuming that means the system code page (verified). I think this is true on Win9x, but that's an operating system limitation that applies to all file systems, including NTFS volumes mounted over the network.
• The number of files on a volume is not limited to 4194304 on FAT32 or 65536 on FAT16 (verified).
• No OS that I know of limits FAT32 volumes to 32 GiB. It's a limitation of some Microsoft formatting tools, not of the filesystem implementation.
• NTFS volumes are not limited to 2 TiB.

-- BenRG (talk) 17:13, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] ExFAT File Size Limit

According to MSDN, there is no 4 GiB file size limit on ExFAT file systems. See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa914353.aspx However, I'm not sure what the actual limit is.
Vfs (talk) 17:26, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

The article says now that exFat has "support for files up to 2⁶⁴ bytes". — Wenli ^{(reply here)} 02:27, 30 May 2008 (UTC)