FAT32 and GW.dat

Has anybody realised that with common gw.dat sizes being over 4GB, systems running with FAT32 formatted hard disks will fall down when trying to increase the size of gw.dat above the 4GB limit?

I'm pretty sure this information is correct, I was wondering if this may be the answer to many recent unsolved GW crash problems.

For the non-techy out there, Windows 95 and 98 will almost certainly have hard disks formatted this way. Windows 2000 will be NTFS (which is ok), Windows XP will be either, but I seem to recall NTFS being an option when you install.

Vista has no problem.

Any uber-techs confirm or deny that this is a problem?

i have a fat32 and i haven't had any problems and mine is 4.32 GB

i think as long as you defrag your comp from time to time you should have no problems. and 4GB sounds quite large for the dat, i know its changed aswell. Try uninstalling it and then re installing it...tghen use the -image command. mines about 2-3GB.

Are you absolutely certain? It's an undeniable fact that FAT32 can not handle file sizes over 4GB (to be precise, 4GB minus one byte or 2^32 -1bytes) - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Al...on_Table#FAT32.

And Smithy - a lot of people have dats over the 4GB mark. Apparently some of it is to do with older dats having "legacy" stuff in there, but deletion and -image-ing may well solve the problem temporarily.

The proper thing to do is, if your system supports NTFS - USE IT! It's a fairly painless procedure to change it in XP. Anything earlier, well ...upgrade :/

A cleanly -image'd gw.dat from about 4 days ago is about 3.55 GB in size so that shouldn't be a problem with FAT32.

Still, I'd also recommend moving to NTFS if possible as the maximum file size isn't FAT32's only design issue: the file system is basically a 32 bit version of the old FAT12 from around 1980, possibly earlier, and it shows - the file system has absolutely no safeguards against data corruption in event of crashes and becomes fragmented much faster than many other file systems. It also has pretty high overhead (space wasted solely on the file system's internal data structures) on large drives.

Why anyone would be running FAT32 these days is beyond me.

Start > Run > Type cmd and hit enter > Type Vol C: Hit enter and make a note of the name and serial number.

Then type Convert C: /FS:NTFS Then hit enter. Follow on-screen instructions.

Ah, Azagoth - you're a man that knows. How do you find out which filesystem you are using if you don't know? I was explaining the benefits of NTFS to a friend a while back, but I can't for the life of me remember how to tell (without using Partition Magic or similar, that is).

Right click on the hard drive and go to properties? Found it there on Vista and its the first place I would have looked on XP anyway.

Argh.

Could have sworn I did that ><

There are some inconsistencies with some of the information presented in this thread.

For converting your drive to NTFS, you just need to open a command prompt (Start > Run > cmd) and then enter convert <drive letter>: /fs:ntfs
You don't need the volume serial number of anything like that at all.

As for the limitations,
FAT32: 4GB - 2 bytes
FAT16: 2GB
FAT12: 16MB
Of course, these are limited by the size of the drive itself.

Most flavors of Linux won't be able to see the NTFS volumes, you'd need to mount the drive to see what's there. Even the, you should be careful with the data. Copying to make a backup is fine, but last I heard; writing data to NTFS from Linux won't do well.

Some newer ones, like recent versions of Ubuntu Linux don't have this problem; they will automatically detect and mount NTFS volumes, and the kernel's supported reading data from NTFS for ages.

Also, at least Ubuntu 8.04 comes with the new userspace NTFS driver, which supports writing to NTFS just fine. I don't think it supports compressed or encrypted partitions or messing around with advanced file permissions, but most people don't use those anyway.

Hmm, deleted gw.dat and performed an -image:

Before: 4,389,469KB

118,000 files later...

After: 3,711,993KB

...so it's half a gig short of the mark. Won't take much more added content. Hmm, then again - what added content?

I started testing Fedora 8 on my old gaming rig about a month ago and regularly write to its storage and media NTFS partitons with NTFS-3G. I've not run into problems thus far (that is with NTFS... the 32-bit distro wasn't put together well imo. :P) Another great option is ntfsprogs/ntfsmount, which I believe is what lordpwn is referring to. I definitely agree about being wary though - In general full NTFS read/write on Linux is still rather new. If you just wanted to mount a NTFS partition to read from you'd be fine, it's the writing that's always been the big fickler. (My personal opinion is that read/write from Linux is just fine so long as you do it intelligently.)

I'm curious about the post made by Ele Mental earlier on in this thread though... Can anyone else verify an instance of this?

Carefull with size information. There are two different things: the size of the content (3.7Go of GW data) and the size taken to store the content (which is usually more due to the fact that most Operating Systems store it in possibly different parts stored in different location of the disk and additionnally there parts are stored in chunks of space called clusters, themselves decomposed into physical sectors of the disk).

Computers were not designed in a user-friendly fashion

I had Win 2000 with FAT32 and GW installed on another NTFS partition. No problems there... so you can save yourself from reinstalling Windows and just create a NTFS partition.

My Gw.dat is 3.60 GB (3,869,518,848 bytes). Stored on disk: 3.60 GB (3,869,519,872 bytes). I always use -image after an update but it won't get any bigger..
And I'm using NTFS..

What is that extra 500mb ppl have? it can't be old content I think, as my gw.dat is soon 2 years old.

Beats me - I've been playing for over 2 years, yet I did a clean install when I got my new pc 6 months ago.

Something causes bloat, but I haven't a clue what it is.

[edit] I see what you mean about strangely reported file sizes. Checking properties it's 3,803,547,136 bytes "size" or "3,803,549,696" size on disk. 2,560 bytes difference. Minimal, but confusing.

my gw.dat is : size 4,78 GB (5.138.992.128 bytes). , and HDD size 4,78 GB (5.138.993.152 bytes)

that includes: Prophecies CE, Factions, Nightfall CE, EoTN.
(yes its on ntfs, but thats more because i work with large files anyway )