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vdi in fat32

Posted: 5. Aug 2008, 05:51
by daggerlin
Can vdi auto-splitting in FAT32?

I don't want to using NTFS.
Therefore, I create vdi in FAT32 formatted disk.
When using over 4G disk space, it crashed.

Posted: 5. Aug 2008, 10:00
by stefan.becker
No way.

Posted: 5. Aug 2008, 14:02
by TerryE
VBox does not support split VDIs.

Due to limitations of FAT32, the largest VDI you can use is 4095Mb. You can however allocate multiple VDIs to a VM, e.g. put C: on one VDI, D: on the next, ...

This has been discussed many time on the forum.

Posted: 7. Aug 2008, 07:19
by daggerlin
sorry. I had searched this forum, but only found topic about zip vdi to backup.

Will VirtualBox support split VDIs in the future?

I want to install ubuntu as ghost OS, and host is windows xp with fat32 format.
The default install is over 4G.
Any suggestion?

Posted: 7. Aug 2008, 07:24
by stefan.becker
Yes. You wont hear it, but NTFS is the best and only Solution. FAT is an crappy old system, there is no more reason to use this.

Posted: 8. Aug 2008, 09:15
by illa
No man, it can not.

Honestly there is a few different solutions I can think of...
-repartion your current hd shrinking the fat32 partition.. add an ntfs partition
-create multiple vdi files of 4GB each and configure it as one volume in ubuntu

From my expereince if you are doing something like this(not using ntfs).., and posting it on a msg board its best to add a sentence on why you can't/don't want to use a higher performing file system with an application that uses very large files... or you will get

16 people telling you

use ntfs

Re: vdi in fat32

Posted: 12. Aug 2008, 12:36
by ppgrainbow
daggerlin wrote:Can vdi auto-splitting in FAT32?

I don't want to using NTFS.
Therefore, I create vdi in FAT32 formatted disk.
When using over 4G disk space, it crashed.
Automatic splitting of VDI files under FAT32 are not possible due to its 4 GB limitation. Any attempts to create a hard disk image on a FAT32 partition larger than 4 GB will cause VirtualBox to crash when trying to create a virtual hard drive.

The best solution is to create a virtual hard disk on a NTFS or a exFAT partition (Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or later).

(Hard drives that are not used for booting purposes can be formatted as a exFAT partition, ya know.)


I experienced my fate when I first tried to create hard disk images on a 60 GB USB hard drive when it was formatted as a FAT32 partition. I ended up having to convert to NTFS.

Posted: 12. Aug 2008, 14:13
by TerryE
If you do convert a partition from FAT to NTFS, you've got to hold your breath. If you PC crashes 1/2 way through then your partition is "toast". So its worth think about at least backing up any essential data off-partition.

Also you must defragment after doing a conversion. This will take a long time because the FAT32 cluster size is typically 64K and the NTFS cluster size 4K, so you end up with thousands of tiny free-space fragments (basically at least one per file).