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    500GB Hard Drive, FAT32, OS-X, XP and VISTA

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by EnglishJohnny, Mar 2, 2009.

  1. EnglishJohnny

    EnglishJohnny Newbie

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    I’ve got a 500GB external hard drive that I have successfully formatted with one FAT32 partition (FAT32 being the necessary format rather than NTFS because the drive is used for read/write purposes by systems operating on Mac OS X, XP and Vista).

    However XP and Vista refuse to recognise the size of the drive beyond 32GB, stating that the drive is full once I have saved that amount of data to it.

    I could overcome this by breaking the hard drive down into circa fifteen 32Gb partitions but don’t really want to do that. Is there any way of forcing XP/Vista to recognise the remaining 400GB+ of free hard drive space on that one FAT32 partition?
     
    EnglishJohnny, Mar 2, 2009
    #1
  2. CoreRepublican

    CoreRepublican Notebook Guru

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    According to
    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463
    XP or Vista can not create larger partitions than 32 GB but can read more. So can it be possible to use it by creating partitions with a 3rd party program such as Partition magic?
     
    CoreRepublican, Mar 2, 2009
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  3. EnglishJohnny

    EnglishJohnny Newbie

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    I've no issue actually creating a FAT32 partition that is greater than 32GB. I successfully used fat32format to do this.

    The problem arises when I start to load the drive/partition with data from XP. It happily saves data to the drive right up to hitting 32GB and then tells me that the drive is full and I should clean it if I want to save more!

    The most infuriating aspect is that you can then click on the disks properties in XP and it tells you that you have only used 32GB and have over 400GB of free space!

    After encountering this issue firt time around, I then tried completing reformatting the 500GB hard drive using Disk Utility on my MacBook Pro. It took 5 hours for that format to complete, only for the exact same problem to occur when I tried transferring data to the drive via XP. Everything transfers and saves successfully on the external drive right up to it hitting 32GB of used space and XP tells me I cannot save any more data to that drive.

    This is nuts, please can somebody tell me there's a way to address it?
     
    EnglishJohnny, Mar 2, 2009
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  4. dtanph

    dtanph Newbie

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    hi

    so far ive use fat32formatter with large capacity drives and loaded files with no problems.

    maybe you should try to check/test the physical hard drive for errors.

    maybe u can try format it to ntfs 1st and try to load files more than 32gb.. if it works then u might have a problem somewhere.
     
    dtanph, Mar 2, 2009
    #4