Jan-Piet Mens

I have a small portable USB drive with a 40GB capacity, which is formatted as a FAT32 file system. Viewing it with Windows' disk management utility I see

I want to reformat that drive, so I did what I used to do in such cases:

c:\>format d: /FS:FAT32
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Enter current volume label for drive D: nicbackup

WARNING, ALL DATA ON NON-REMOVABLE DISK
DRIVE D: WILL BE LOST!
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? y
Verifying 38146M
The volume is too big for FAT32.

and was most surprised by the error–message I got after an endless wait informing me that the volume is too big. Considering a FAT32 volume ought to be able to be 8TB in size, my surprise was great.

I quickly found fat32format which does what I expect of it very quickly.

c:\>fat32format d:
Warning ALL data on drive 'd' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure (y/n) :y
Size : 39GB 78124032 sectors
512 Bytes Per Sector, Cluster size 32768 bytes
Volume ID is 1604:151e
32 Reserved Sectors, 9535 Sectors per FAT, 2 fats
1220389 Total clusters
1220388 Free Clusters
Formatting drive d:...
Clearing out 19166 sectors for Reserved sectors, fats and root cluster...
Wrote 9812992 bytes in 0.44024 seconds, 22290094.766499 bytes/sec
Initialising reserved sectors and FATs...
Done
c:\>

A simple if time–consuming chkdsk /r d: ensures the volume is ready for use.