Hi,
My laptop is running windows 10.0.16299.248 and suddenly it is unable to read FAT32 partitions.
Plugging in a USB flash drive formatted with FAT32 file system, the system will complain of it needs to be formatted.
Creating a FAT32 partition in the laptop hard drive the format will not complete, with error message "process cannot be completed".
How can I remedy this? Any thoughts besides reinstalling my system?
Thank you
HEnry
Have you tried another usb drive? To make sure the usb is formatted correctly perform the following. Why do you want to use fat32 instead of ntfs?
Run the following command from command prompt
diskpart
List disk
select disk 1 (very Important to ensure you select the correct # of your USB drive)
clean
create partition primary
format quick fs=ntfs quick (change ntfs to fat32 if needed)
assign
If you need more help to determine the correct drive to select, then after running list disk command take a picture of your screen and upload
or you can do the following
Right click on the top bar command window
Left click on Edit then Select Alloesnt
Right click on the top bar again
Left click on edit then copy
paste into your reply
Also be aware that Microsoft utilities will not format a partition as FAT32 if it is larger then 32 GB. Third party utilities can do this.
One other issue not mentioned much is if Windows creates a FAT32 partition on a 64GB or larger drive it may not see the remaining unallocated space. I use the free bootable GPARTED LiveCD to work with partitioning or a Linux LiveDVD that contains GPARTED, have formatted a 500GB External USB drive as FAT32 which Win10 can read.
Gee Berton that sounds like it would make a great tutorial: "Format a Large External USB Drive as FAT32 for Windows 10" If you'd like to do this together, having now done one, I could pitch in and help. Great topic!
--Ed--
The very first thing to try is simply to click the Power button in Start and select Restart. This fixes lots of things that have apparently stopped working properly.
If you still have problems after that, work through...
sfc /scannow - Run SFC Command in Windows 10
Dism's RestoreHealth - Use DISM to Repair Windows 10 Image
...and if they can't fix it, an in-place repair upgrade will reinstall Windows while keeping all your installed apps and documents.
Repair Install Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade
I think it is a bad idea. Apart from other considerations (security, journaling etc), with FAT32, as the volume size grows so does your cluster size and you waste more and more space (NTFS is 4KB for everything by default up until 16TB: Default cluster size for NTFS, FAT, and exFAT).
This is how cluster size is affected for FAT32:According to here the book Using Windows 98 Second Edition says anywhere from 33% to 66% of the space on a FAT32 partition can be wasted depending on how many small files are present." Drives are bigger now than 20 years ago so it would be even worse.PHP Code:Partition Size ----- Cluster Size ------ Number of Disk Sectors (512 bytes/sector)
<260MB ------------- 512 bytes --------- 1
260MB - 8GB ------- 4KB --------------- 8
8GB - 16GB ------ 8KB --------------- 16
16GB - 32GB ------ 16KB -------------- 32
> 32GB ------------- 32KB -------------- 64
It might be a good idea for a disk shared between different operating systems holding only massive files (movies for example) that didn't need any security. Otherwise there are better solutions.
I think MS picked a good (possibly too large) cutoff at 32GB with XP.
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