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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther System
For external drives you want to share between Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, they must be in FAT32 format. Windows XP will create a FAT32 partition no greater than 32GB. Linux will create very large FAT32 partitions (if you have Linux at your disposal). Today I've found a way to do the same on Mac OS X.
  1. Open Disk Utility. Find the disk in the list that you want to format, control-click and select "Information". You're looking for the "Disk Identifier," which should be something like disk1, disk2, disk3 etc.
  2. Create the DOS partition table. Open Terminal and type fdisk -e /dev/rdisk#, where # is the disk number you got from step one. Now type auto dos to create one big FAT32 partition. Finally, type write and then quit to save the new partition table.
  3. Format the FAT32 partition. Type newfs_msdos -F 32 -v "MyVolumeName" /dev/rdisk#s1, where # is the disk number you got in step one. This will format the drive as FAT32.
  4. Check if the volume is mounted. If it isn't, close and reopen Disk Utility, select "MyVolumeName" and choose File -> Mount."
Here's a transcript (line breaks added for narrower display) to show how I formatted an 80GB external firewire drive.
[~] % man fdisk
[~] % fdisk -e /dev/rdisk4
fdisk: could not open MBR file /usr/standalone/i386/boot0:
  No such file or directory
Enter 'help' for information
fdisk: 1> auto dos
fdisk:*1> write
Writing MBR at offset 0.
fdisk: 1> quit
[~] % newfs_msdos -F 32 -v "MUSIC1" /dev/rdisk4s1
/dev/rdisk4s1: 156263232 sectors in 2441613 FAT32 clusters
  (32768 bytes/cluster)
bps=512 spc=64 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf0 spt=32 hds=255 hid=0
  bsec=156301425 bspf=19076 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=6
[robg adds: I haven't tested this one...]
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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther | 18 comments | Create New Account
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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: giskard22 on Jul 28, '04 11:45:06AM

I could have sworn that Disk Utility lets you format volumes as "MS-DOS format", which is in fact FAT32. Check out the "Volume Format" menu choices in the Erase tab.



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Format large Fat32
Authored by: jbelkin on May 23, '09 10:47:07PM

In Apple's DISK UTILITY, if you take one extra step, it should work for most devices that need to see a FAT 32 HDD ... this works on a 500GB and 1 TB HDD ...

Select Partition with ERASE tab in Disc Utility - Select 1 Partition, then bring up ADVANCED and select the FAT 32 Choice and mounting as a DOS selection. Then Select FAT 32 as the Partition choice.

ERASE/PARTITION - should work.



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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: fds on Jul 28, '04 11:58:26AM

It is also untrue that WinXP cannot create FAT32 volumes greater than 32 GB. Of course it can.



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No you can't...
Authored by: ptremond on Jul 28, '04 12:18:13PM

According to the MS support website, you cannot format a partition larger than 32 GB in XP, though it is able to support partitions larger than 32 GB.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/q314/4/63.asp&NoWebContent=1



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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: silverkeeper on Jul 28, '04 06:28:14PM

Disk Management only lets you create FAT32 partitions up to 32GB; anything larger must/should be NTFS.

The only way to create a larger FAT32 partition within XP is to use 3rd party formatting tool.

---
SilverKeeper



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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: jazap on Nov 14, '04 08:52:54PM

Actually, no, by default windows XP will not let you format any drive over 32Gb on Fat32, you have to get a utility to do it. you cant even do it in dos, here's the printout if you try.

C:\>format I: /fs:fat32 /q
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Enter current volume label for drive I: MyCrap

WARNING, ALL DATA ON NON-REMOVABLE DISK
DRIVE I: WILL BE LOST!
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? y
QuickFormatting 76319M
The volume is too big for FAT32.

C:\>





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Be very careful with fdisk!
Authored by: paulio on Jul 28, '04 12:14:28PM

Be very careful with fdisk! It will do EXACTLY what you ask it to do, even if you ask it to destroy your data. One typo can ruin your whole day.

Disk Utility is a much better choice unless it is completely incapable of doing what you need.



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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: atverd on Jul 28, '04 12:48:43PM

FAT32 can't store file larger then 4GB-1, which makes it pretty much useless for me because I cannot save DVD images or large backups on it. So I just bought macdrive and installed it on all my windows boxes - not that flexible, but now I can read/write HFS+ volumes right from windows and it's freaking fast with firewire drives (faster then PowerBook G4 1Ghz, to be honest) plus you get an access to mac formated iPods from windows. Apple should distribute this program as part of Mac OS X and iPods :)



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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: osxpounder on Jul 28, '04 04:17:22PM

Have you had any problems since installing MacDrive? A coworker of mine has it on his XP box, and ever since, his AV software has failed to download and install updates. Just wondering if you'd encountered any odd side effects of using the MacDrive software.

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--
osxpounder



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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: atverd on Jul 28, '04 07:02:23PM

I don't have an XP, only windows 2000 and with this system macdrive never created a single problem for me. I'm using it with two different firewire drives (with different bridging controllers) and iPod. If you have doubts I'd suggest to download a trial version and try it.



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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: silverkeeper on Jul 28, '04 06:30:34PM

In addition to this problem noted, also be aware that other version of OS X, namely 10.2.x, cannot mount a FAT32 formatted disc with a volume larger than 128GB; anything larger will not mount.

If drive is used on an OS 9 system, there can be data corruption on any volume larger than 32GB.

---
SilverKeeper



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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: Typhoon14 on Jul 28, '04 03:18:09PM

Um, why not simply format it as MS-DOS format in Disk Utility? I know in older versions of OS X, this would only format as FAT16, but in 10.3.4 at least, MS-DOS format formats as FAT32.



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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: rnickerson on Aug 09, '04 06:43:02PM

Do you have to use the command line to get disk utility to format MS-DOS? In the GUI version of Disk Utility for 10.3.4 there are only the options of Mac OS Extended and Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in the format menu.



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Fat32 vs HFS+ Performance
Authored by: MartySells on Jul 29, '04 09:14:44AM
I did some benchmarking of FAT32 compared with HFS+ which are available here.

There is a performance hit for FAT32 compared with HFS+. Copying about 1G of 10mb files takes 90 seconds on HFS and 167 seconds on FAT32. Writing to FAT32 partitions appears to be much slower but reading is pretty close.

-m

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Mounting FAT volumes
Authored by: neal_nelson on Jul 30, '04 09:00:04AM

It's all nice being able to format large FAT volumes but how are can I mount one? I have a 30GB drive with a USB interface which must be FAT formatted (It reads memory cards and stores them on it's disc) and my PowerBook just won't mount it. When I plug it in, an icon comes up after some time and I can look at the drive but when I try to copy anything from it, I never get a progress dialog and nothing ever happens until I pull the plug.



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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: lethe on Jan 10, '05 09:08:08AM

Hi, this was a very helpful hint for me. Also, notice that you can use disk utility to partition the disk, and only newfs the partition you want (you don't have to make the entire disk fat32, I like to have an HFS+ partition as well).

Also, I couldn't get the partition to mount following the instructions. Finally I tried

$ mkdir Desktop/pcdisk
$ mount_msdos /dev/disk1s7 Desktop/pcdisk/
you must be running as root to load modules into the kernel
mount_msdos: msdos filesystem is not available
$ sudo mount_msdos /dev/disk1s7 Desktop/pcdisk/
Password:
kextload: /System/Library/Extensions/msdosfs.kext loaded successfully

which worked, and explains why I couldn't get Disk Utility to mount the volume: the msdos filesystem kernel module was not loaded. This has the disadvantage that automounter is not taking care of the mounting and dismounting, when I'm done, I will want to remove the mount directory and such. I was hoping that after doing the above step I could unmount and then get disk utility to mount it properly, now that the kernel module was loaded, but no such luck.



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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: lethe on Jan 17, '05 11:52:41PM

the first part of my comment above doesn't work. If you partition the drive with your mac, the PC won't be able to read it. I suspect something about incompatible partition tables. I have only been able to make the PC read the drive if I format the entire drive as 1 FAT partition.



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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: dimjaguar on Jan 20, '07 04:00:58PM

This tip didn't work for me. The "s#" suffix number was different for me, some other stuff went wrong, but anyway I didn't investigate much further.

I CAME HERE because I was a bit too slow to figure out how Disk Utility was supposed to do it and eventually concluded it couldn't do MS DOS/FAT format... I kept clicking on my volume (which was the problem) and it didn't give the option to format with MS-DOS, the FAT32 option.

If anyone else is as peculiarly challenged as me and thinks there isn't much of a difference between Disks and Volumes, know that in order to format large FAT32 disks, you have to click on the *Disk*, which is the mother node that says "##.# GB QAZWSX123 Media", not the Volume below it, with your much more euphonic volume label on it. And voila, there's the MS DOS option. And a lot of other things I was missing.

Hope this helps.



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