I imagine that very few people who use Windows have USBs on fat32. In fact, Windows format by defaults on NTFS with the option format on exFAT. There is no option fo format on FAT32, you need to use a specific tool. More so, most people just burn the iso to the usb, deleting everyhing on it.
With all the Terabyte of drives available for desktop machines and the affordable SSDs pushing toward the same limit, why is that every single USB stick (drive) out there is sold with the same FAT32 format? This is a hindrance as the max filesize on this format is 4Gig. So how come MSFT/APPL and Co have not agreed on a new file format to get past this out dated standard?
At least in Germany all cheap USB sticks sold to average consumers in stores are still FAT32. I highly doubt they format different fs for different countries, the printing on the packaging indicates they're all sold EU-wide.
FAT32 is still very dominant & I wonder why Microsoft & Apple don't push the vendors to use exFAT. Users unaware of filesystems won't need their stick being recognized by the UEFI, but they will have files > 4GB.
That is strange - I thought windows Media creator utility automatically formats usb to exactly what it needs. Even if i put I. fat32 or ext4 stick it'll create a working install.
Isn't it still a default somewhere? I recently formatted a pendrive on Windows and somehow mindlessly selected FAT (and ofc had troubles down the road). I probably picked a default somewhere. And to respond your question:
>Why on earth would you do that? People have been using exFAT for many years now.
Most people have no idea what FAT is. If presented a choicee between FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext4 I'm certain they don't care, don't understand the implication, and would just click a random option. Which is OK, not everyone should be a IT expert, it's MS job to make the experience smooth.
edit: and a technical reason: i think FAT32 is the only guaranteed fs supported by UEFI
Sadly, exFat doesn't work reliably on Windows as I've had random software fail when data is stored on a drive formatted with exFat.
Mostly that's the software's fault, mistakenly assuming anything "not NTFS" is FAT32 and insisting I need to "upgrade" my drives, even though I'm only using it as project storage.
I honestly don't know why user mode software can tell what format the volume is in, and wouldn't just expect the OS to handle it or provide various feature flags like VOLUME_SUPPORT_LARGE_FILES or so.
Most USB flash disks I've seen (and I've seen many) are even nowadays mostly FAT32. "Portable drives" aka USB-to-SATA are shipped preformatted to NTFS, and only with the advent of SDXC did preformatted exFAT start to appear.
(It has to do with driver support, I would guess - exFAT works in Win7+, but as long as the world runs on WinXP kiosks (ugh), vendors go with the lowest common denominator. Note that a flash disk will go places - what's your car entertainment system running? Linux? Android? Windows CE? Anfient Embedded Monftrofity? Will it support exFAT? Unlikely.)
The problem is, there is still no somewhat decent way to have a USB drive that's readable and writable by all three major OS families (Windows, Linux and macOS) and keep UNIX permissions working on it:
- FAT32 can't go above 4GB files, can't do sparse files and can't store UNIX permissions at all
- NTFS can do large and sparse files, but can't deal with UNIX permissions, instead bringing NT ACLs (which no one else understands). exFAT used to be patent encumbered and has the same limitations that NTFS has, plus its support is nowhere near as battle-tested as NTFS is
- HFS/APFS are not supported at all under Windows and support in Linux is spotty at best
- ext4 has third-party read (and if you're risk-tolerant, write) support on Windows and Linux, but it's hacky or expensive
That's how DOS worked with FAT16, yes. It will still apply to files on USB and SD cards (FAT32), but internal Windows drives will be formatted with NTFS.
The FAT entries are cleared, so if the file is fragmented, reassembling requires knowledge of the format. Also, Wikipedia tells me that FAT32 directory entries also have some bits cleared, so the right data on disk may not be found.
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