FAT32 on external drive

[ghostee]

I recently got a 200gig hard drive and the Macally firewire/usb2 enclosure. I wanted to maintain compatability with PC's and formatted it as Fat32, all one partition. I loaded about 50 gigs on the drive, and kept getting errors when I tried to copy these two files. I sat and watched the progress last night as it tried to copy and noticed it stopped at exactly 4 gigs. Is there a 4 gig limitation on file size on a Fat32 drive?

 

[grapes911]

Is there a 4 gig limitation on file size on a Fat32 drive?

There is a file size limit of 4GB minus 1 byte with FAT32 formating.

 

[ghostee]

Thanks. I moved everything off the drive and reformatted using the Mac file system (journaled), and all is well.

 

[Westside guy]

You can still use it with your PC by purchasing Mediafour's MacDrive. You can download a free trial to see if it works well for you.

I think it's a good product.

 

[ghostee]

Thanks, I'm definately gonna bookmark that for when I need it in the future.

 

[homerjward]

if a file name has any characters that a fat32 file name doesnt support ( . / etc) then it wont copy properly. i ran into that a lot when backing up my files onto a fat32 drive.