On Thu, 05 Sep 2013 09:30:56 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:

> FAT32 can go up to 2TB with 512b sectors and 16TB with 4k sectors. There
> are lots of utilities that will allow you to format a disk >16GB with
> FAT32, but Windows insists on allowing only NTFS for anything greater
> than 16GB.
> 
> So it is indeed Microsoft adopting a "Father knows best" attitude.

FAT32 is MS' filesystem, so they get to decide what features to support.  
Like many companies, they probably want the older stuff to go away, and 
this is one way of making that happen.

Supporting old and outdated technology is expensive, and even a company 
as large as Microsoft has to watch what their operating expenses are.

> And, yes I want to complain about it, when the only way to recover a
> $150,000 network appliance is by booting a recovery utility off a USB
> device to reinstall the OS on the appliance itself.

That sounds like the fault of the network appliance manufacturer, not the 
company that makes your desktop OS.

> Of course, this is one of the things you find out at 2am, when the only
> thing you have lying around is a 512GB external drive and 3 levels of
> management are looking over your shoulder, wondering if you're serious
> when you tell them you need a DOS 6.0 bootable floppy to run the
> BootitNG toolkit to reformat the drive.

I don't see how that's MS' fault, either, though.  Sure, it's 
inconvenient to learn this when you're in a crisis, but you can't blame 
them for the time it became apparent to you, whether it was at 2AM in a 
DR situation or in the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday when you had 
nothing going on.

Jim

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