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USB drive not showing full size

I have a 4GB usb drive. Just now i have formatted it with fat filesystem. But after formatting its only showing 200MB instead of 4GB. I am using windows VISTA operating system. I am frightened.

Can anybody suggest any solution?

Is there anything like a link or shared mount point for FAT32 folders in Linux/Android?

I often want the same files to be accessed by different apps on my Android phone, but the apps look in different folders. Is there a way to make two different folder paths on a FAT SD card point to the same file? For EXT, I think I could do this with a symbolic or hard link, but those don't exist for FAT. Can FAT be extended to support them? Can Android use an EXT-formatted SD card? Can a folder be mounted on top of another folder?

If this does exist, does it have any negative side effects?

Will I suffer any major drawback(s) if I have the drive formatted as FAT-32

Is there any disadvantage(s) of using a 500GB external hard drive formatted as FAT-32 or is it simply a choice?

I am asking this because I am an owner of a PS3 and it only recognizes FAT-32 formatted drives. I want the drive to be recognized on the PS3 but I also will use it with multiple computers.

My question is: Will I suffer any major drawback(s) if I have the drive formatted as FAT32?

Create a shared FAT32 partition on Boot Camp MacBook

I have a MacBook set up with Boot Camp, and the XP partition is NTFS. The split is 50-50 and there is no unallocated space on the hard drive.

I want to create a shared 50GB FAT32 partition for my DropBox files, so regardless of which OS I boot into, I only have to keep one copy of my DropBox on the laptop shared between the two OS.

So my question is how do I create this new partition without starting fresh? I would assume I do it from OS X?

Thanks Tom

read and write permission for FAT32 partition in Ubuntu

This is a strange problem. I have the following partition table

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          13      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2              13        5737    45978624    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3            5738       10600    39062047+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4           10601       19457    71143852+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           10601       11208     4883728+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6           11209       15033    30720000    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda7           15033       19457    35537920    7  HPFS/NTFS

I dual boot Win7 (sda2) and Ubuntu (sda3) and wanted to use the FAT23 partition to share files across two OS's.

I followed some online tutorial and have done these:

sudo mkdir /media/FAT32
sudo chmod 777 /media/FAT32
sudo mount /dev/sda6/ /media/FAT32

after I mounted the file, I can only read but not be able to write to it.

I checked the file permission, it becomes:

drwxr-xr-x

but after I unmounted the it then becomes

drwxrwxrwx

and I can read and write to it.

very strange.

I don't know where I've down wrong.

Cheers.

FAT filesystem - bad superblock

Last night my android phone said it can't read the SD card and it wanted to format it. I pulled it out, put it in a card reader and tried to mount it on my desktop pc:

$ sudo mount /dev/sdb1 tmp
[sudo] password for ivan: 
mount: /dev/sdb1: can't read superblock

Tried to fsck it:

$ sudo fsck.msdos /dev/sdb1
dosfsck 3.0.12, 29 Oct 2011, FAT32, LFN
  Contains a free cluster (2). Assuming EOF.
FAT32 root dir starts with a bad cluster!

And to see if there is actualy anything to mount:

$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb

Disk /dev/sdb: 3951 MB, 3951034368 bytes
122 heads, 57 sectors/track, 1109 cylinders, total 7716864 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            8192     7716863     3854336    b  W95 FAT32

Now I'm doing a dd image before I've broken something else.

I know EXT filesystems have superblock backups across the device that can be used in such a moment. Does FAT have backups?

Do you know any method for recovery?

I've tried photorec and it did manage to retrieve data, but without any file names or directory structure. It doesn't do any good except to restore my pictures, and they are my least concern.

Getting around the FAT32 4GB file size limit

I recently purchased a 32GB USB 3 stick that was formatted FAT32. I plugged it into my computer and attempted to copy a film onto it, the file was over 4GB however and it would not let me copy the file across because of the 4GB file size limit imposed by FAT32.

After some googling I found that I could format my USB stick to have an exFAT format which would mean I could put files onto the stick greater than 4GB in size and the drive would work on both my Mac and my PC.

The problem with this solution is that my PS3 cannot detect the USB stick when it is formatted with exFAT.

I would like to know if there is a way I can have my USB stick formatted so it can have files greater than 4 GB and work on my PC, Mac and PS3.

How can I reformat microSD cards that were created read-only?

My company was burning some microSD cards (4000 of them) and the multi burning machine we were using gives us the option to make the microSD read-only.

I didn't know this was possible, but apparently it flips a binary switch in the microSD card.

We now need to reformat all 4000 of the microSD cards and start fresh. We cannot format them because they are read only. I am not using a SD adapter so the possibility of the lock switch is a non issue.

Gparted cannot format them and running this command:

sudo mount -o remount,rw  /media/48EC-B32A

… returns this error:

cannot remount block device /dev/sdb1 read-write, is write-protected

Is there any way to force format these or are they permamantly gone?

How do I save 4 GB+ files on a FAT32 flash drive? [duplicate]

I have a 6 GB file that I want to move to my flash drive. The only problem is that the limitations of FAT32 prevent me. I would like to avoid NTFS. I also can't use exFAT because I would then have difficulty booting from it. It's already fully compressed, so I can't make it any smaller.

Is there a way to work around this limitation?

Used space on an "empty," formatted flash drive

I recently purchased a SanDisk Cruzer CZ36 16GB USB 2.0 flash drive. The flash drive was formatted as FAT32 from the package. I will need to store files that are larger than 4GB on this flash drive, so I decided to reformat the flash drive as NTFS. (Also, the drive had some SanDisk SecureAccess software preloaded on it that I don't want.) On Windows 7, I right-clicked the drive and selected Format. I did a full format by unchecking the "Quick format" box.

After the format, however, Windows tells me that the drive is not completely empty. If I right-click on the drive and select Properties, Windows gives me this infomation:

Type:        Removable Disk
File system: NTFS

Used space:     96,169,984 bytes    91.7 MB
Free space: 15,912,419,328 bytes    14.8 GB

Capacity:   16,008,589,312 bytes    14.9 GB

Why is this the case, since I just formatted the drive? Is this to be expected? Or are some files still lingering on the drive?

When I open the drive on Windows Explorer, no folders or files appear, even when I tell Windows to show hidden folders and files. But, still, I find it worrisome that there is 91.7 MB some how being used on this "empty" drive.

Convert NTFS to FAT32 without losing data

I understand that you can convert a FAT32 drive to NTFS without formatting or backing up the data and later restoring - is the same thing possible in the other direction?

I want to convert my NTFS portable hard drive to FAT32 so that my PS3 will recognise it.

If it's not possible from within Windows, are there any free programs which will allow me to do it?

Should I format USB sticks and SD cards to FAT, FAT32, exFAT or NTFS? (Windows files, live Linux distors)

Does it depend on the media size which one to chose or on some other parameters? In Windows 7 FAT16 is the default. In pendrivelinux.com's Universal USB Installer FAT32. Which one to chose? How about NTFS for Windows use?

How about exFAT? It is tne Microsoft designed filesystem for removable media. Is there a difference in USB sticks and SD cards in this regard?

Edit: seeing developments in the other thread, should I still use something like exFAT if I don't want Recycle bins created on every single machine I plug my USB thumb drive in?

How to make a file non-deletable on an USB drive?

Somebody used my USB drive and upon returning it to me, I found a autorun.inf that is undeleteable. I tried changing it's file attribute which is only H (not even set as a system file) but it keeps on saying Access Denied.

The USB is set on FAT32, upon asking my friend, he told me that he uses Panda USB Vaccine

How do they do this? Im trying to use some Disk Sector editor but have no idea which hex file they change to make this kind of file and make it deletable again. Formatting the drive removes it, but I'm curious as to how to be able to set those kind of file attribute.

How to set default permissions for automounted FAT drives in Ubuntu 9.10?

I've got many FAT32 drives that I'd like to mount in Ubuntu such that they have permission mode 700 for directories and 600 for all other files. By default, they have 755 for all files, which is not particularly useful since almost no non-directories should be executable, and it screws up version control repos hosted on the drives.

"Back in the day" I would have had the drives listed in /etc/fstab with the umask/dmask I want and there was no such thing as a default. These days, drives automount under their volume names. Which is great, except now I have no idea how to set the default.

I have tried changing the /system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options gconf key with no apparently effect. It was 077 initially but the mounted drive reflected a default of 022; changing it and re-inserting the drives resulted in the files still having permission bits of 755.

Why is FAT32 limited to just under 2^28 clusters?

With FAT16 the maximum partition size is 2GB when your maximum cluster size is 32K.

This is calculated by multiplying the number of addressable units by the cluster size.

(2¹⁶ Allocation units) * (2¹⁵ bytes/cluster) = 2 GiB

However with FAT32, when I do the same calculation I get a much larger number than the 8 TiB maximum when using 2³² clusters.

(2³² Allocation units) * (cluster size)

If I use a cluster size of 512 bytes, I've already arrived at 2 TiB.

In an XP TechNet article, Microsoft says

The maximum possible number of clusters on a FAT32 volume is 268,435,445, and there is a maximum of 32 KB per cluster, along with the space required for the file allocation table (FAT).

This puts the maximum cluster size at 2²⁸ - 11.

Why is the maximum number of clusters in FAT32 2²⁸-11 and not 2³², given that it was 2¹⁶ in FAT16?