1 Topic by imweasel

  • imweasel
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  • Registered: 2016-03-17
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Topic: Gparted and fat32FS on 3TB HDD

I am having issues with creating a single partition with a fat32 FS using v 0.18.0 and 0.25.0 on a WD external my passport ultra 3TB drive.

I create a GTP partition table and have it format in a fat32FS. It proceeds to create a single partition in a fat32. However it only allocates 746GB to the partition and leaves the rest (1.99TB) unallocated.

Gparted then shows an error symbol next to the 746GB partition stating that to 'recover' the unallocated to use the 'check' function to allocate the unallocated space.

On v0.18.0 it would then crash. I did not try this on the v0.25.0.

I did a quick search and found that you could then try using the 'move' command to move the partition.

On v0.18.0 it would crash. Using the v0.25.0 it did not crash and started moving the partition in 16MB blocks at a time!

This was going to take a little over 29 hours to complete.

I finally decided I would live with 2 partitions, one 1TB and one 1.75TB. This was easily accomplished using v0.25.0. I did not try this on v0.18.0.

I also then deleted the larger partition and used the move command to allocate the now unallocated 1.75TB left on the HDD. This was going to take 6+ hours as it was moving it in 8MB blocks.

I decided I would live with 2 partitions as my final answer.

I just don't get why Gparted cannot make a single partition of 3TB in a fat32FS.

Is this just a bug? Feature? Satanic? Requires an advanced degree from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? Animal sacrifice? Full moon?

Thanks!

2 Reply by mfleetwo

  • mfleetwo
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Re: Gparted and fat32FS on 3TB HDD

On a 512 byte sector hard disks the maximum volume size is reported to be 2 TiB.
*Wikipedia File Allocation Table / FAT32
*Microsoft Default cluster size for NTFS, FAT, and exFAT / Default cluster sizes for FAT32

It appears that with partitions larger than 2 TiB that mkfs.fat doesn't properly query the partition size and ends up creating a 1 TiB file system.  That is a bug with mkfs.fat in dosfstools package.

GParted should just probably limit creation of FAT32 volumes to 2 TiB (rather than trying to worry about the disk sector size / specifying a logical sector size).

Edit: Sorry.  URLs in lists don't work.  Fixed.