[GLLUG] Formatting in Linux

[Melson, Paul]

> -----Original Message-----
> Anyway, there's a size limit of 64G for 
> FAT32 because something (number of sectors?  number of blocks?) is 
> stored in a signed 32-bit int in the filesystem itself.  ISTR a patch 
> for the Linux kernel that allowed it to use an unsigned int for this 
> value and so use 128G FAT32 filesystems.  They may have changed the 
> 32-bit thing in the latest versions of 'Doze, but I don't 
> know whether 
> the mkdosfs maintainer has taken this change into account.

That may be a factor for some Linux systems because of how mkfs.msdos is
written, but FAT32 itself has a max partition size of 2TB, same as NTFS.
Win32 systems have a 32GB limitation for FAT32 file systems because of
similar coding issues.  Any time I've seen a ~1TB FAT32 or NTFS
partition, the server its on has been built with PQMagic.

The big problem with FAT32 vs. NTFS though is that FAT32 still has a 4GB
file size limit, so when using tools like dd to make disk images, you're
stuck using split to create <4GB slices of the disk image and then cat
to put them back together.

BTW, I (re)discovered a decent way to put previously split slices back
together without joining them (which is sometimes impractical, like when
restoring from a network share).  

cat xa[a-z] xb[a-z] | dd of=/dev/my/disk

This will ensure that the slices are sent to stdout in the order they
were created.  Just using 'cat *' can cause all kinds of interesting
problems if it gets the slices out of order.

PaulM