robomatic -

By the time I got around to WinXP, SP-1 was pretty much standards, so I haven't looked at anything before that. There may be limitations for some earlier versions, but the only one I've found for WinXP SP1 is reads 2 TB or more, essentially the address limit for 32 bit addys and 2 KB clusters, I think.

The Microsoft Knowledge Base does include at least one reference that suggests that you can use Win98 to format larger FAT32 drives. You do need Win98SE, I believe; but there shouldn't be much around old enough not to have what it added. I believe (don't trust my memory on this) that WinME also could work some larger partitions, although the limits may be a little different. That would be expected since it's just a kludged-up Win98.

Since the only real reason to keep large FAT16 or FAT32 drives around is for compatibility with xNIX and/or older Windows, it would seem like any FAT format one of them makes should be okay with WinXP. Microsoft may have limited the WinXP format size just to encourage people to use NTFS (or discourage them from using FAT), although they don't give any rationale in what I've seen.

Aside from the format/partition question, there is a known limit on the maximum total size you can copy and paste reliably in Win Explorer. I don't recall what the numbers were, and have never hit up against it; but attempting to copy a full large drive to someplace else in a singe pass could conceivable drop some files. There may also be a limit on number of files in a single pass, but if there is it's huge. At the time I encountered the note on the Win Explorer limits, I didn't think I'd ever see a drive that big - I believe it is a "server size" number.

John