I want to make a fat32 drive that I can easily access from linux and windows and fat32 seems to be the best option. I am trying to figure out which partition type to use: win95 fat32 or win95 fat32(LBA).

I'm not really sure what the difference is. this site says that fat32(lba) is just an extended-int13 version of win95 fat32. if that's true, then do they both use LBA or LBA mapping or whatever? i tried to read the wikipedia article on LBA and it was way over my head, but LBA addressing sounds like it might be a nice feature.

the same site also says some stuff about possible data loss with lba and int13 extensions. It also says Windows NT does not recognize the four W95 types: 0b, 0c, 0e, 0f(0b is w95 fat32 and 0c is w95 fat32(LBA)). i'm assuming this information is dated because i've been using these partition types with winxp and vista, which are winNT based.

Sorry to answer a question with another question, but, why do you believe that fat32 is better to exchange data between Linux and Windows? That was true a few years ago, but any recent distribution should have NTFS support enabled on the kernel and it is stable as well (reading, writing and etc). I can think of several reasons not to use FAT32. The first would be how easy data can get corrupted on FAT32 and the file size limit it has. If I remember correctly, you can't have a file bigger than 4GB in FAT32, so if you ever download a DVD-iso, you won't be able to save the file to your disk.

This is yet another guess, but I don't really think it matters these days. LBA was used back in the days when you had disks bigger than 8GB. Without LBA, some BIOS could not address disks bigger than 8GB.

Don't know, I myself would not use FAT32 these days, unless you have some very specific use for that (say, you still use win98 or something ). I would use either NTFS or EXT3 for data exchange Windows/Linux. You can access ext2/ext3 partitions from Windows easily as well. Just google for it

Another couple probing questions for you to consider are these.
Are you using a flash drive, an external hd or a partition on an internal hd?

I agree with Mega Man X if it is a flash drive or external/internal hd with more than 4GB of space, use ext2/3 or NTFS.

If it's a flash drive that's 4GB or smaller, you'd want to format it in Windows with FAT32. Linux will recognize it by default.

FAT is well past its "sell by" date. It is primitive, insecure, and unreliable. Given that Linux now provides read/write support for NTFS, and that there is a very decent ext2/3 driver available for Windows, there is no reason to have it.

so it's safe to write to an ntfs filesystem from linux now? i've been mounting my windows drives read-only because there used to be problems with the linux ntfs driver(it was experimental or something) that could damage the filesystem or cause data loss or something.

FAT might still be a better choice than NTFS if the drive is a small usb stick or flash card, because NTFS imposes a sizable overhead. It could eat up as much as 20% of the drive if its small enough. For larger drives though, NTFS is the way to go. OR ext3, if you use one of the 3rd-party Windows drivers for it.

This was, and still is, true of the standard kernel driver. It's only good for reading. But these days everybody uses the user-space ntfs-3g driver, which appears to be quite safe. I've never heard of anybody having data problems with it.

There may be no rhyme or reason for it, but FAT is still the fall-back, lowest-common-denominator "standard".

My New Philips DVD player has a USB port that will allow it to connect to an external hard drive and it will play DivX/XviD files, AVI files, and JPGs from that drive. It's a bit brain-dead, 13-character filename limit, very poor navigation (five entries visible at one time), etc. but it does work. But it only can read FAT file systems. I bought an external USB 250G drive that came preformatted with an FAT FS and the DVD player will read it fine. It's been nice to have that many DivX files available from the couch instead of having to go to my computer and copy them one or two at a time onto a thumb drive.

But the power connector for that 250G drive broke and to format another drive for the same purpose does require being able to format more than 32GB as FAT. NT/XP/Vista won't do that, it's either install Win98 somewhere or use Linux. My preference is Linux.

So to say that there is "no reason to have" FAT is a little narrow. For my purposes, the OP's question is quite relevant. In an ideal world, manufacturers would be smarter and would not rely on a FAT-driver-on-a-chip for their product design check-off list, but I'm not willing to wait for that blessed day.

I hope this helps,
August

BTW, The VOLUME SIZE limit for FAT32 will have a MINIMUM drive size limit of 32GB (Win2K and XP installation program limits only). A 64GB limit for Win98/ME's original FDisk utility and for other things a ~135GB theoretical limit.

The 2GB, 4GB and 8GB limits are a mix of pre-FAT32 (FAT12, FAT16) and single file size limits.

That's OK so am I.

It's an old thread, but nobody answered the intial question, which referred to the difference between FAT32 (hex code b in fdisk) and FAT32 (LBA) (hex code c in fdisk).

FAT 32 is for Win95 OSR2 Fat32 with a partition up to 2047Mb and Type c is for LBA-mapped capable of 2Tb size. The type b is for the early Win95 system and type c is for later Win95 and all Win98.

So if someone wants to use FAT32 for an usb.stick, which still makes sense when you want to exchange data with Macs, use hex code c in fdisk, and not b.

2 members found this post helpful.

I used to use 'C', but then I seemed to start using 'B' for some unknown reason, so it is definately back to using 'C' for me, I must have forgotten there was a reason for the difference.

It's still that way with vanilla ntfs driver from kernel.org. Only read is safe and write is experimental. But ntfsprogs a fuse based filesystem handles ntfs mostly correct. It's very mature by now.

'c' type is best if you don't run Windows 95/98 these days. And vfat supports disk filesystem space of 2terabyte.