[haiku-development] Re: [RFC] fat initialization function -- fat driver
- From: Gabriele Biffi <mlist@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 23 May 2008 10:06:45 +0200
Marco Minutoli wrote:
Hello
I am on the way of writing a fat addon for the disk system and I
noticed that the FAT driver miss an initialization function ATM.
First of all does it make any sense to write the initialization
function for the actual FAT driver? I saw it has a different licence
and a it's not designed in an OO way like BFS so I was
wondering if you want to rewrite it sooner or later.
It does make sense, for consistency in the user experience. It will make
possible to use the mkfs and DriveSetup to initialize the disks.
[1] suggests how to initialize a FAT volume on a device with 512Mb
sectors and explain Windows policies during the initialization
process. In Windows by default for device size under 512MB a FAT16
volume is built while for disk size larger than 512MB a FAT32 volume is
initialized. FAT12 is only used for floppy. Should we maintain this
policies?
By default is fine, but please provide an option to choose another
format: I bought a 2 GB card for my phone, but it takes only FAT16.
As you can readn in [2] Win2k and WinXP are able to read FAT
volume of any size but the format utility isn't able to initialize
volume larger than 32GB. Is this an acceptable limitation for us?
This is a limitation forced by Microsoft (it has been documented), to
push people using NTFS. Pretty much every other initialization tool can
make FAT32 disks of any size, and any external HDD you buy comes
formatted in FAT32 whatever the size is. We are not Microsoft, so we do
not have to be limited.
Greetings,
Gabriele
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