Note If you find fat32format a bit fiddly to use or these instructions a bit hard to follow you should try the replacement for fat32format. It is a Windows application with a GUI. Try it here
I recently got a SATA 250GB disk for testing FATLIB. It turns out that Windows XP won't let you format a volume bigger than 32GB with FAT32. I could use NTFS, but that's not what I FATlib supports. In fact, NTFS can only be written safely by Windows XP - there are as far as I know no other drivers for other OS's, unlike FAT which is supported by virtually anything.
As Microsoft put it here
In order to initialize after the installation process is done, first run source /bin/activate and then run conda init. Perform the below-mentioned steps to enable SSD. Once the SSD is connected to the Mac OS, a message showing the drive cannot be read will be prompted. In that message, click the Initialize button To initialize an SSD, highlight the drive and click the Erase button. Blindly following their recommendations, IMHO, is not a great idea, and in this instance, drastically reduces readability 'at a glance'.Not only that if this is a shared code base (with source that gets built via multiple compilers – e.g. In my case I use VS 2005, 2013 and 2019 for some of the same source – legacy OS support), then this.
You need Mac OS 10.4 or better. 10.3 will not do the job. In 10.4.x and 10.5.x, simply double click on the jar file and Java 1.5 should load the.jar file. If you need to allocate more memory to edit larger files, then you can do the following: Go to Applications and then Utilities in Finder. Make sure that your Mac has a connection to the internet. Then turn on your Mac and immediately press and hold Command (⌘)-R until you see an Apple logo or other image. If you're asked to select a user you know the password for, select the user, click Next, then enter their administrator password.
You cannot format a volume larger than 32 gigabytes (GB) in size using the FAT32 file system during the Windows XP installation process. Windows XP can mount and support FAT32 volumes larger than 32 GB (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB by using the Format tool during Setup. If you need to format a volume that is larger than 32 GB, use the NTFS file system to format it. Another option is to start from a Microsoft Windows 98 or Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me) Startup disk and use the Format tool included on the disk.
Using Windows 98 obviously opens up other issues - It doesn't support USB 2.0 or SATA as far as I know. Formatting a huge disk will take ages. It suports IDE, but not 48bit LBA, which is required for drives greater than 137GB. Also, you need to patch format.exe and fdisk to work with disks greater than 64GB. Even then scandisk will corrupt large disks unless you disable it. It can be done, but basically, this is ancient 16 bit code, and using it on modern hardware is not a good idea. There is a port of mkdosfs from Linux to Win32. I tried it, and chkdsk complained about being unable to test a RAW filesystem. It also uses funny cluster sizes, only 4K for normal sized disks.
Actually, looking back at the Microsoft comment, if I could format the volume myself, all would be OK. Fat32 is pretty simple, so it occured to me to write a fast format routine to do the job. Note that the 32GB limit is a limit of the formatter in Windows XP. FAT32 itselft should be OK to 2TB, limited by a 32 bit sector count in the boot sector. XP comes with a partitioning tool, called Disk Management. It even has Wizards for partitoning. This should be a cinch.
I've tested this with a SATA disk as follows. Power off the computer and connect the disk. Power up again - check the Bios finds it. If you have a IDE or SATA disk, make sure you power off before connecting, USB and Firewire ones can be connected with the power on.
Initializing Microsoft Teams
Click Start menu, select Run and enter diskmgmt.msc
If it asks you to initialise the disk, make sure you select a Basic disk, as opposed to a Dynamic.
There's a guide on Disk Management here You need to find the disk with unallocated space. Right click on it and select 'New Partition' and follow these steps, clicking 'Next' to get move on at each stage.- Partition Wizard starts, just click next to move on
- Select Primary Partition.
- Enter the maximum size for the Partition Size
- Choose assign a drive letter. I used F:
- Select 'Do not Format this partition'
- There will be a dialog box, summarising all the previous stuff. Click Finish
Now you have a drive letter, this is what we will pass to the formatter
Now download a copy of fat32format. Extract the single EXE file to somewhere suitable, like C:.
Click Start->Run and enter
When the command prompt opens, type this - C: is the place you extracted the exe file to. Note if this sort of command line stuff makes your head hurt, you should probably give this a try instead
press enter and then type this. You need to replace f: with the drive letter you are trying to format.
You should see this displayed
Now when it says this, it really means it. If you format the boot sector, FATs and root directory will be filled with zeros. By typing pressing Y and hitting return, you're also absolving me of liability for whatever was on the disk before.
Assuming you don't bail out at this point you should see something like this -
This means that all has gone according to plan. It should take about 4 seconds per Terabyte to format the disk. You can run chkdsk f: at this point if you're curious, and see something like this -
This shows that my calculations match up with the ones inside Windows, which is good news
It is also possible to set the cluster size with a -cN parameter where N is the number of sectors per cluster. On a hard disk, which is the only sort we support, one sector is 512 bytes. The cluster size will be N times 512. I played around with this, and it seems that Windows XP supports small cluster sizes, except that chkdsk runs very slowly, presumably because it needs to read the huge FAT that results from these settings. Given the nature of FAT32, you can't reduce the cluster size such that the number of clusters is more than 228. I'd recommend using the default cluster sizes, which are the Microsoft recommended ones, unless you need to force them for testing or something
You can download either just the fat32format binary ~20K or the fat32format binary and source ~30K The source code can be compiled with Vistual Studio 6.0 or later. The current version number is 1.01.
There are a couple of things you need to know before running fat32format. You need to have Administrator rights on XP for it to work, since it opens the drive in raw write mode. You also need to make sure that there are no open files on the volume - if there are you will see a message like this -
Incidentally, if you are running admin and it still complains about open files, you can use Process Explorer to find out which process is guilty. Run it, Press Ctrl+F and enter the drive letter, e.g. E: and close any processes that have it open
This should make it a bit harder to lose data, assuming that you have at least one open file on the drives with data you want to keep. The drive that Windows is currently running from will have lots of files open - the pagefile, registry etc. I usually keep an Explorer.exe open in the root directory of any other drives to block format from running. Finally, it will only work with hard disks with 512 bytes per sector. If you have a DVD-Ram disk, format using the Windows formatter. If you have an optical disk drive bigger than 32GB, send me a sample and I'll port to it.
One last thing - fat32format is designed to format disks quickly. It doesn't check for bad sectors. If you need integrity checks, run a chkdsk /R f: after the format.
Finally and most importantly, it isn't possible to recover your data if you format the wrong disk, be careful using it. It is licensed under the GPL license - you may distribute source and binaries. You can build it into an open source application. If you want to build it into a closed source application you should approach me for licensing it under a BSD style license for a fee.
Update
If you find this software useful, please send me an some money via Paypal. I've had >170000 downloads, and a lot of emails, 99% successes. There are some fails, but they seem to be with hard drives which nothing else can write to either. If you have this, try to testing combinations to find out which is causing the problem. E.g. if you have Disks A and B and USB cases C and D, try the combinations AC, AD, BC and BD to work out which is bad. Return the bad component for a replacement, and you're good to go. If you bought a single unit, try getting it replaced.
Update 2
As of now, fat32format has worked on disks from 40GB to 2TB
Interfaces tested include IDE/PATA, SATA, eSATA, USB and Firewire
The formatted disks work on XP, Mac, Linux, the iPod (40gb), various Nas boxes and mediaplayers and Norton Ghost 2003
Formatting works on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 and Vista. Note that Windows 9x/Me are not supported and do not work, but you can use the format.exe supplied with them instead
If it fails send me an email, please put FAT32 in the subject.
Update 3
If you have problems creating partitions bigger than 137GB on an ATA (IDE) disk connected to the motherboard, make sure you have SP1 or later and an LBA48 compatible bios. Check your motherboard site for a bios update.
Vista
fat32format works with Vista. The UI has changed a bit when creating drives and UAC makes the whole process a bit more cumbersome.
To create drive letters, Right Click on My Computer and Select Manage. UAC prompts you to escalate privileges, do so. You can right click on empty drives and Initialize them. Once you've done that you can create new volumes by right clicking on them and selecting New Simple Volume. Fast formatting them with NTFS is quick and should detect a completely dead drive.
If you have Vista there is a quick way to get an Admin cmd prompt. Click the Start button/ Windows flag in the bottom left of the screen and enter cmd like on XP but press Ctrl+Shift+Enter, you'll get a privilege escalation dialog click OK and you end up with an Admin command prompt, helpfully labelled as Administrator: C:Windowssystem32cmd.exe
This is the best way to run fat32format. It's always been Admin only, it's just that on XP most power users ran with Admin rights all the time.
Versions
1.02
A couple of people asked me about 64K cluster size. There are compatibility problems with this, as 16 bit set up programs sometimes assume that the cluster size will fit in a 16 bit integer. When calculating disk space, they thus end up with a value of zero. Fat32format disables cluster sizes bigger than 32K for this reason. However, some people need this, so the current version has the check disabled. You still need to force the cluster size by hand though, e.g. fat32format -c128 f:
1.03
Fixes for making partitions created above sector 0xffff bootable, and a cosmetic fix for the drive size printout when formatting drives bigger than 1TB ( 0x7fffffff sectors )
1.04
Fix for 'Failed to set partition info'. Some drives have no partition table, so you can't set the the partition type.
It was possible to set the cluster size too high resulting in too few clusters, or too high resulting in too many - fat32 must have between 2^16 and 2^28 clusters because of various compatibility considerations. Added code to check that.
Fixed an error where it crashes if people use /? to get help
1.05
Added support for bytes per sector values of other than 512
1.07
GPT support, fix for boot sector when using Windows AIK's bootsect.exe, FSCTL_ALLOW_EXTENDED_DASD_IO
Initialising.. Mac Os X
Click here to go homeDownload the installer:
Miniconda installer for macOS.
Anaconda installer for macOS.
Verify your installer hashes.
Install:
Miniconda---In your terminal window, run:
Anaconda---Double-click the
.pkg
file.
Follow the prompts on the installer screens.
If you are unsure about any setting, accept the defaults. Youcan change them later.
To make the changes take effect, close and then re-open yourterminal window.
Test your installation. In your terminal window orAnaconda Prompt, run the command
condalist
. A list of installed packages appearsif it has been installed correctly.
Installing in silent mode¶
Note
The following instructions are for Miniconda. For Anaconda,substitute Anaconda
for Miniconda
in all of the commands.
To run the silent installation ofMiniconda for macOS or Linux, specify the -b and -p arguments ofthe bash installer. The following arguments are supported:
-b---Batch mode with no PATH modifications to
~/.bashrc
.Assumes that you agree to the license agreement. Does not editthe.bashrc
or.bash_profile
files.-p---Installation prefix/path.
-f---Force installation even if prefix -p already exists.
EXAMPLE:
The installer prompts 'Do you wish the installer to initialize Miniconda3 by running condainit
?' We recommend 'yes'.
Note
If you enter 'no', then conda will not modify your shell scripts at all. In order to initialize after the installation process is done, first run sourcetoconda>/bin/activate
and then run condainit
.
MacOS Catalina
If you are on macOS Catalina, the new default shell is zsh. You will instead need to run sourcetoconda>/bin/activate
followed by condainitzsh
.
Initialising.. Mac Os Catalina
Updating Anaconda or Miniconda¶
Open a terminal window.
Navigate to the
anaconda
directory.Run
condaupdateconda
.
Initialising.. Mac Os Download
Uninstalling Anaconda or Miniconda¶
You cannot format a volume larger than 32 gigabytes (GB) in size using the FAT32 file system during the Windows XP installation process. Windows XP can mount and support FAT32 volumes larger than 32 GB (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB by using the Format tool during Setup. If you need to format a volume that is larger than 32 GB, use the NTFS file system to format it. Another option is to start from a Microsoft Windows 98 or Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me) Startup disk and use the Format tool included on the disk.
Using Windows 98 obviously opens up other issues - It doesn't support USB 2.0 or SATA as far as I know. Formatting a huge disk will take ages. It suports IDE, but not 48bit LBA, which is required for drives greater than 137GB. Also, you need to patch format.exe and fdisk to work with disks greater than 64GB. Even then scandisk will corrupt large disks unless you disable it. It can be done, but basically, this is ancient 16 bit code, and using it on modern hardware is not a good idea. There is a port of mkdosfs from Linux to Win32. I tried it, and chkdsk complained about being unable to test a RAW filesystem. It also uses funny cluster sizes, only 4K for normal sized disks.
Actually, looking back at the Microsoft comment, if I could format the volume myself, all would be OK. Fat32 is pretty simple, so it occured to me to write a fast format routine to do the job. Note that the 32GB limit is a limit of the formatter in Windows XP. FAT32 itselft should be OK to 2TB, limited by a 32 bit sector count in the boot sector. XP comes with a partitioning tool, called Disk Management. It even has Wizards for partitoning. This should be a cinch.
I've tested this with a SATA disk as follows. Power off the computer and connect the disk. Power up again - check the Bios finds it. If you have a IDE or SATA disk, make sure you power off before connecting, USB and Firewire ones can be connected with the power on.
Initializing Microsoft Teams
Click Start menu, select Run and enter diskmgmt.msc
If it asks you to initialise the disk, make sure you select a Basic disk, as opposed to a Dynamic.
There's a guide on Disk Management here You need to find the disk with unallocated space. Right click on it and select 'New Partition' and follow these steps, clicking 'Next' to get move on at each stage.- Partition Wizard starts, just click next to move on
- Select Primary Partition.
- Enter the maximum size for the Partition Size
- Choose assign a drive letter. I used F:
- Select 'Do not Format this partition'
- There will be a dialog box, summarising all the previous stuff. Click Finish
Now you have a drive letter, this is what we will pass to the formatter
Now download a copy of fat32format. Extract the single EXE file to somewhere suitable, like C:.
Click Start->Run and enter
When the command prompt opens, type this - C: is the place you extracted the exe file to. Note if this sort of command line stuff makes your head hurt, you should probably give this a try instead
press enter and then type this. You need to replace f: with the drive letter you are trying to format.
You should see this displayed
Now when it says this, it really means it. If you format the boot sector, FATs and root directory will be filled with zeros. By typing pressing Y and hitting return, you're also absolving me of liability for whatever was on the disk before.
Assuming you don't bail out at this point you should see something like this -
This means that all has gone according to plan. It should take about 4 seconds per Terabyte to format the disk. You can run chkdsk f: at this point if you're curious, and see something like this -
This shows that my calculations match up with the ones inside Windows, which is good news
It is also possible to set the cluster size with a -cN parameter where N is the number of sectors per cluster. On a hard disk, which is the only sort we support, one sector is 512 bytes. The cluster size will be N times 512. I played around with this, and it seems that Windows XP supports small cluster sizes, except that chkdsk runs very slowly, presumably because it needs to read the huge FAT that results from these settings. Given the nature of FAT32, you can't reduce the cluster size such that the number of clusters is more than 228. I'd recommend using the default cluster sizes, which are the Microsoft recommended ones, unless you need to force them for testing or something
You can download either just the fat32format binary ~20K or the fat32format binary and source ~30K The source code can be compiled with Vistual Studio 6.0 or later. The current version number is 1.01.
There are a couple of things you need to know before running fat32format. You need to have Administrator rights on XP for it to work, since it opens the drive in raw write mode. You also need to make sure that there are no open files on the volume - if there are you will see a message like this -
Incidentally, if you are running admin and it still complains about open files, you can use Process Explorer to find out which process is guilty. Run it, Press Ctrl+F and enter the drive letter, e.g. E: and close any processes that have it open
This should make it a bit harder to lose data, assuming that you have at least one open file on the drives with data you want to keep. The drive that Windows is currently running from will have lots of files open - the pagefile, registry etc. I usually keep an Explorer.exe open in the root directory of any other drives to block format from running. Finally, it will only work with hard disks with 512 bytes per sector. If you have a DVD-Ram disk, format using the Windows formatter. If you have an optical disk drive bigger than 32GB, send me a sample and I'll port to it.
One last thing - fat32format is designed to format disks quickly. It doesn't check for bad sectors. If you need integrity checks, run a chkdsk /R f: after the format.
Finally and most importantly, it isn't possible to recover your data if you format the wrong disk, be careful using it. It is licensed under the GPL license - you may distribute source and binaries. You can build it into an open source application. If you want to build it into a closed source application you should approach me for licensing it under a BSD style license for a fee.
Update
If you find this software useful, please send me an some money via Paypal. I've had >170000 downloads, and a lot of emails, 99% successes. There are some fails, but they seem to be with hard drives which nothing else can write to either. If you have this, try to testing combinations to find out which is causing the problem. E.g. if you have Disks A and B and USB cases C and D, try the combinations AC, AD, BC and BD to work out which is bad. Return the bad component for a replacement, and you're good to go. If you bought a single unit, try getting it replaced.
Update 2
As of now, fat32format has worked on disks from 40GB to 2TB
Interfaces tested include IDE/PATA, SATA, eSATA, USB and Firewire
The formatted disks work on XP, Mac, Linux, the iPod (40gb), various Nas boxes and mediaplayers and Norton Ghost 2003
Formatting works on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 and Vista. Note that Windows 9x/Me are not supported and do not work, but you can use the format.exe supplied with them instead
If it fails send me an email, please put FAT32 in the subject.
Update 3
If you have problems creating partitions bigger than 137GB on an ATA (IDE) disk connected to the motherboard, make sure you have SP1 or later and an LBA48 compatible bios. Check your motherboard site for a bios update.
Vista
fat32format works with Vista. The UI has changed a bit when creating drives and UAC makes the whole process a bit more cumbersome.
To create drive letters, Right Click on My Computer and Select Manage. UAC prompts you to escalate privileges, do so. You can right click on empty drives and Initialize them. Once you've done that you can create new volumes by right clicking on them and selecting New Simple Volume. Fast formatting them with NTFS is quick and should detect a completely dead drive.
If you have Vista there is a quick way to get an Admin cmd prompt. Click the Start button/ Windows flag in the bottom left of the screen and enter cmd like on XP but press Ctrl+Shift+Enter, you'll get a privilege escalation dialog click OK and you end up with an Admin command prompt, helpfully labelled as Administrator: C:Windowssystem32cmd.exe
This is the best way to run fat32format. It's always been Admin only, it's just that on XP most power users ran with Admin rights all the time.
Versions
1.02
A couple of people asked me about 64K cluster size. There are compatibility problems with this, as 16 bit set up programs sometimes assume that the cluster size will fit in a 16 bit integer. When calculating disk space, they thus end up with a value of zero. Fat32format disables cluster sizes bigger than 32K for this reason. However, some people need this, so the current version has the check disabled. You still need to force the cluster size by hand though, e.g. fat32format -c128 f:
1.03
Fixes for making partitions created above sector 0xffff bootable, and a cosmetic fix for the drive size printout when formatting drives bigger than 1TB ( 0x7fffffff sectors )
1.04
Fix for 'Failed to set partition info'. Some drives have no partition table, so you can't set the the partition type.
It was possible to set the cluster size too high resulting in too few clusters, or too high resulting in too many - fat32 must have between 2^16 and 2^28 clusters because of various compatibility considerations. Added code to check that.
Fixed an error where it crashes if people use /? to get help
1.05
Added support for bytes per sector values of other than 512
1.07
GPT support, fix for boot sector when using Windows AIK's bootsect.exe, FSCTL_ALLOW_EXTENDED_DASD_IO
Initialising.. Mac Os X
Click here to go homeDownload the installer:
Miniconda installer for macOS.
Anaconda installer for macOS.
Verify your installer hashes.
Install:
Miniconda---In your terminal window, run:
Anaconda---Double-click the
.pkg
file.
Follow the prompts on the installer screens.
If you are unsure about any setting, accept the defaults. Youcan change them later.
To make the changes take effect, close and then re-open yourterminal window.
Test your installation. In your terminal window orAnaconda Prompt, run the command
condalist
. A list of installed packages appearsif it has been installed correctly.
Installing in silent mode¶
Note
The following instructions are for Miniconda. For Anaconda,substitute Anaconda
for Miniconda
in all of the commands.
To run the silent installation ofMiniconda for macOS or Linux, specify the -b and -p arguments ofthe bash installer. The following arguments are supported:
-b---Batch mode with no PATH modifications to
~/.bashrc
.Assumes that you agree to the license agreement. Does not editthe.bashrc
or.bash_profile
files.-p---Installation prefix/path.
-f---Force installation even if prefix -p already exists.
EXAMPLE:
The installer prompts 'Do you wish the installer to initialize Miniconda3 by running condainit
?' We recommend 'yes'.
Note
If you enter 'no', then conda will not modify your shell scripts at all. In order to initialize after the installation process is done, first run sourcetoconda>/bin/activate
and then run condainit
.
MacOS Catalina
If you are on macOS Catalina, the new default shell is zsh. You will instead need to run sourcetoconda>/bin/activate
followed by condainitzsh
.
Initialising.. Mac Os Catalina
Updating Anaconda or Miniconda¶
Open a terminal window.
Navigate to the
anaconda
directory.Run
condaupdateconda
.
Initialising.. Mac Os Download
Uninstalling Anaconda or Miniconda¶
Open a terminal window.
Remove the entire Miniconda install directory with:
OPTIONAL: Edit
~/.bash_profile
to remove the Minicondadirectory from your PATH environment variable.Remove the following hidden file and folders that may havebeen created in the home directory:
.condarc
file.conda
directory.continuum
directory
By running: