If you try formatting a 64GB+ drive in Windows, you will find that you may’t specify the File system as FAT32. You won’t be able to format such drives to FAT32 on Windows either through the command line or the graphical interface.
In fact, you may be concerned by the file size limit on a FAT32 partition if you experienced the message “The file is too large for the destination file system” while copying a file to this drive. However, Windows allows using a preformatted FAT32 drive with a much higher capacity.
What Are the Size Limitations of FAT32?
There are two main size limitations of a FAT32 partition. One, the maximum partition size Windows can format as FAT32 is limited to 32GB. And the other, you may only have up to 4GB of a single file inside a FAT32 drive with Large-file support.
Design-wise, it is possible toformat a partitionof up to 2TB size to a FAT32 file system with the default sector size of 512 bytes. And by setting the sector size to 4090 bytes of 4KB, it is theoretically possible to format a maximum of 16TB partition to this file system.
However, it is not recommended to do so as FAT32 is not a fault-tolerant system, and using this system with such large drives carries the risk of data loss. This is why Microsoft moved to NTFS.
And if we talk about the 4GB file size limit, its cause is rooted in the FAT32 design. FAT uses an index that specifies the starting position and the length of a file. The length is stored in a 32-bit field, so the maximum value it can hold is 2^32-1 = 4294967295 bytes = 4GB.
How to Bypass the 32GB Size Limit?
you may’t bypass the maximum file size limit of 4 GB on a FAT32 partition as it is a design issue. We recommend switching to NTFS or exFAT instead to avoid such limitations.
However, it is possible to evade the maximum partition capacity limit by using third-party software or using a Linux system to format the partition.
Using Third-party Software
Some third-party applications allow converting any partition of up to 2TB to FAT32 file format. Here, we utilize the GUI version of the free application, FAT32 Format, as an example.
Using Linux Virtual Machine or Live Linux USB
Advanced users who are very familiar with using Linux systems and/or Virtual Machines can also try formatting the drive to FAT32 on the Linux system. It will not only bypass the 32 GB limit on Windows systems but also the 2TB limit on most third-party apps.
However keep in mind that if you want to surpass the 2TB limit, you need to have a GPT partition scheme on the drive and format it with 4k sectors and 64k cluster size.
