Partition a 1gb external into 500gb NTFS and 500gb fat32?

[Vade]

Can you do this? I'm looking into buying a terrabyte external hardrive with half of it for ISOs (larger than 4gb) and the other half for media that can be read from the PS3/360.

Also, what's a good price and brand for a 1TB external harddrive? I was looking at the WD My Book Essential 2.0 from Best Buy for $250.

[Cephius]

Yeah, you can. Most partition software such as Acronis Disk Manager (most popular one) let you resize hard drives and format them however you like.

[Sigi]

Umm, do you mean Tb to 500Gb and 500Gb... or Gb to Mb?

Terabyte = 1024 Gigabytes, 1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes. You can't split giga to giga. And yes, you CAN create a 500GB Fat32 partition, HOWEVER it is not as efficient at that size as NTFS, Ext2fs, ReiserFS, and Ext3fs.

Per Wikipedia: (LONG QUOTE ALERT!)
In theory, this should support a total of approximately 250 million (228) clusters, allowing for drive sizes in the range of 8 terabytes with 32K clusters, but the boot sector uses a 32 bit field to limit volume size to 232 sectors (2TB on a hard disk with 512 byte sectors). See this article by Raymond Chen.

On Windows 95/98, due to the version of Microsoft's ScanDisk utility included with these operating systems being a 16-bit application, the FAT structure is not allowed to grow beyond around 4 million (< 222) clusters, placing the volume limit at 127.53 gigabytes.[7]. A limitation in original versions of Windows 98/98SE's Fdisk causes it to incorrectly report disk sizes over 64GB.[8] A corrected version is available from Microsoft. These limitations do not apply to Windows 2000/XP except during Setup, in which there is a 32GB limit.[9] Windows ME supports the FAT32 file system without any limits.[10]

FAT32 was introduced with Windows 95 OSR2, although reformatting was needed to use it, and DriveSpace 3 (the version that came with Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows 98) never supported it. Windows 98 introduced a utility to convert existing hard disks from FAT16 to FAT32 without loss of data. In the NT line, native support for FAT32 arrived in Windows 2000. A free FAT32 driver for Windows NT 4.0 was available from Winternals, a company later acquired by Microsoft. Since the acquisition the driver is no longer officially available.

Windows 2000 and Windows XP can read and write to FAT32 file systems of any size, but the format program on Windows XP can only create FAT32 file systems up to 32 GB. The format program with Windows 2000, however, can in fact create FAT32 file systems larger than 32 GB. Third party utilities are available which can format larger FAT32 file systems, up to 2TB. Thompson and Thompson (2003) write[11] that “Bizarrely, Microsoft states that this behavior is by design.” A Microsoft knowledge base article[7] indeed confirms the limitation and the "by design" statement, but gives no rationale or explanation. However, a Microsoft TechNet article states that the 32 GB limit was an arbitrary limit imposed because many tasks on a very large FAT32 file system become slow and inefficient.[12] Peter Norton's opinion[13] is that “Microsoft has intentionally crippled the FAT32 file system.”

The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GB minus 1 Byte (232?1 bytes). For most users, this has become the most nagging limit of FAT32 as of 2007, since video capture and editing applications and some other software can easily exceed this limit. Most new Windows machines now ship with NTFS and thus avoid these problems, but until mid-2006, those who run dual boot systems or who move external data drives between computers with different operating systems had little choice but to stick with FAT32. Since then, full support for NTFS has become available in Linux and many other operating systems, by installing the FUSE library (on Linux) together with the NTFS-3G application. Data exchange is also possible between Windows and Linux by using the Linux-native ext2 or ext3 file systems through the use of external drivers for Windows, such as ext2 IFS; however, Windows cannot boot from ext2 or ext3 partitions.

So, why do you want to do this? XP would have issues with the size if you are doing an install... Vista is dubious, and for Linux, you'd be better off using Ext3 or making only a *small* fat32 partition for shared data.

[Vade]

Er, mainly because PS3 can't read NTFS and I want to have a partition for media. And I have Wii ISOs that are 4.7 GB that you can't have on FAT32. So, I need both types of partitions...

Anyway, already received a 750GB Seagate Free Agent Pro and set up the separate partitions. Thanks!