Those of you who know me in real life are trying not to say anything while your eyes
bug out of your heads. Let’s be clear, what I mean is Fat32. Why in the
world did Microsoft hang on to this file system format for so long?
I am taking a Visual Studio Team System class tomorrow and need to run a virtual machine
(VM) that is 10G in size. Since VMs run faster on non-system volumes I went
to copy the VM to my external USB drive. The external drive had 40G free, so
no problem. Unfortunately one arcane piece of knowledge that I now recall about
Fat32 (which was on my USB volume) is that it has a file size limit of 4G.
So a friend (thanks, Lawrence) pointed out the convert.exe which is part of Windows.
So I am now waiting for my USB drive to finish converting.
Let’s recap.
- All I want is to run VM.
- I need a separate hard drive to do that efficiently.
-
The separate hard drive needs to be a certain file format to hold the VM ( any genuinely
useful VM would be at least 4G ). -
The way to “fix” the separate drive is to invoke a command line utility
that gets rid of a Windows file system standard that was badly implemented in 1986
or so.
Windows sucks.