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