How to create big FAT32 partitions

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Ok by looking the title of this thread you may wonder "Why should I need to create a FAT32 partition?"

Well that is because if you plan to install Linux on your pc, FAT 32 is the only file system that can be read/write by both the operating systems.

Today I have installed Ubuntu on my pc - which is a really great OS and you should try it for sure - and wanted to create a big partition (61GB) for sharing files with both the operating systems (firefox/thunderbird profiles, mysql dbs, apache's htdocs, etc.)

The bad thing is that windows XP don't like FAT 32 so much (maybe that's the Microsoft's way to competition...) so you need to use other tools in order to create one.

First I tried Partition Magic, which have helped in many cases in the past, but unfortunately not in this one as I got an unexpected error. Next was CMD -> format /FS:FAT32 e: which didn't worked as WinXP can format FAT 32 partitions of up to 4Gb(!)

And the third plan which is the actual solution to this problem(and BTW a very fast one), is mkdosfs which is actually a linux command ported for windows machines.

Anyway I posted this as a future reference and as it got me a few hours to find that solution so I guess others may benefit from that too

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BTW as this thread is related to linux/windowsXP installations, I think you might also find useful this article , which is a guide on how to use the same profiles for Firefox and Thunderbird.

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