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Windows 8.1 and FAT32 Drives


Dave-H

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Can anyone tell me whether Windows 8/8.1 has a history of not playing nicely with large FAT32 formatted drives?

I have a recurring problem, which while it doesn't happen very often, is very annoying and worrying when it does.
As you can see from my signature, I have a mult-boot machine.
My main Archive drive is a 1TB SATA drive, connected to the motherboard via a SATA add-in card.
All my videos, pictures, and documents are on it, but no system files.
Although I have the NTFS driver installed on Windows 98, so I can access NTFS drives, I've preferred to keep the Archive drive as FAT32, along with the Windows 98 (of course) and Windows XP system drives.

The problem I'm having is that sometimes when I manipulate files on the Archive drive when booted into Windows 8.1, the drive file system gets left in a corrupted state, which I usually don't discover until I boot back into Windows XP, which is still my normal OS.

Today was a case in point.
I went to 8.1 to do some video editing, which was both reading from the Archive drive and writing the exported file to it.
When I had finished exporting, I deleted the source file from the drive, but of course left the new edited file there.

On going back to Windows XP, I tried to open the exported file, and got a message that the file system was corrupted and to run Chkdsk.

This I did, and it ended up having to repair several files, which it saved in the usual FOUND.000 folder (why those folders have to hidden is quite beyond me BTW!)

The original saved video file had completely gone of course, but fortunately it turned out to be one of the files saved under another name by Chkdsk.
 

The other files it reported as damaged were two other video files which I hadn't touched when I went into 8.1.
One of them was apparently OK, but the other one, despite having the right name and thumbnail, when played turned out to be a duplicate of the first one!
Fortunately the drive was all backed up so I could restore them, but how on earth can this happen?!

This has happened several times before, and I can find no reason for it.
On at least a couple of occasions I have lost files that were then completely unrecoverable with Chkdsk.

One of the symptoms I've seen several times is that I delete files on the drive in Windows 8.1, but then when I go back to XP, Explorer shows them as being still there, although usually corrupted and unusable and Chkdsk has to be run to repair the file system.

All very strange!
Any advice welcome.
Cheers, Dave.
:)

 

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I'm clueless here, since I've got very little experience with 8.1 (but more than with 10, which, for me is nil): I guess 8.1 desn't expect any FAT-32 device to be much larger than 32GiB... Why? Because MS has more script kiddies than real programmers, nowadays. So, I recommend convering your big partition to NTFS. Maybe RLoew can find what's wrong, though. Try PMing him about it.

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The only place where I use FAT32 still is my microSD card because some apps on my phone such as the SAMBA server which mount it won't play nice with exFAT. I've copied several huge files and large number of small files to it under Windows 8.1 and haven't noticed any problems. It was formatted under Windows 8.1 using the default allocation unit size. Maybe you could backup the data and try formatting it from the newer OS? For example, I know that Windows 7 and later systems do proper disk sector alignment when formatting drives which is important for not affecting performance of SSDs, although for hard drives which don't have 4K physical sectors I don't think it would matter so much. But it won't hurt to format it under the newer OS and then use it from older OSes.

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I have had six 931 GiB FAT-32 partitions for 2 years already and no issue at all, but the newest OS my machine runs is 7 Ultimate SP1 x64. Last month I converted one of them to NTFS, in order to set-up a VirtualBox, because I needed a place in which to host filles bigger than 4 GiB (the .VHDs).

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Thanks guys!
A good idea formatting the drive in 8.1, but can you do that?
In XP you can't format any drive over 32 GB using FAT32, so I would be surprised if 8.1 could do it.
I had to use Windows 98SE to format my 1TB FAT32 drive.
I think you might be able to do it with format.exe, but I've never tried that.
:)
 

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Yes indeed Den, I was just following up on the suggestion from @xpclient that I try reformatting it with FAT32 using 8.1, which I didn't think was possible.
I could indeed convert it to NTFS, but I'm a bit puzzled why I would have to, as I would have thought that 8.1 if it supported FAT32 at all, would be happy even with a large partition.
:)
 

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12 minutes ago, Dave-H said:

I could indeed convert it to NTFS, but I'm a bit puzzled why I would have to, as I would have thought that 8.1 if it supported FAT32 at all, would be happy even with a large partition.
:)
 

Sure. And I do think it may even be intended to. But I'm considering it may be buggy in its FAT-32 support, because it's probably untested with anything bigger than 32GB, if I do understand how the minds of those poor-fellows-that-pass-as-programmers-at-MS-nowadays work. :yes:

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Oh yes indeed I forgot about the maximum volume size that NT-based Windows has on FAT32 volumes. Although I also forgot how I formatted my 64 GB microSDXC card from Windows 8.1. I definitely did not use the cmd line format tool nor do I have any Windows 9xs lying around except in VMs. I just don't remember now. Must have used some tool. The built-in Format GUI of Explorer definitely doesn't show me FAT32 option at all. I must have used this tool: http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm

Format.png

Edited by xpclient
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