my Audio drive, not formatted? what?

  • Thread starter Thread starter lucid
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lucid

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yesterday i had a recording session. so i booted up my computer and saw that my audio drive no longer had the lable "audio"...

wondering what was going on i tried to open it up. it said that the drive was unformatted. i tried everything. but in the end i had to reformat it (luckily almost everything was backed up)...

so, what do you guys think happened?

oh, and i formatted from windows (XP) and it only allowed me to do NTFS. FAT32 was not an option. it was if i wanted to format my C. so how can i REformat it in fat32?

system:

amd athlong xp1800+
asus a7m266
20 gig system
80 gig audio (switchable with 15 gig misc. drive)
dvd
cd-rw
delta 44

thanks
 
NTFS is better than Fat32.

Not sure why it would suddenly become unreadable.
 
i have always read that FAT32 was superior to NTFS when it came to audio work...

anyone else?
 
NTFS is more secure, more reliable, easier to fix if corrupt, better for large drives, etc.

BUT, its still a bit slower than FAT32. Make sure that if you format in NTFS you use a cluster size of 4k, otherwise it can be a lot slower than typically 4k clustered FAT32, especially when working with large files/lots of data as in audio work. Most formatting programs/commands default to 4k cluster sizes for both NTFS and FAT32, but I've heard that when converting from FAT32 to NTFS, Microsoft formatting commands/programs can only use a cluster size of 512 bytes, which would be pretty slow. I know Partition Magic can do the conversion without this limitation and I think even change the cluster size.

Actually, 8k clusters might be better yet when working with big audio files, but it would slow down some other things and waste more space. 4k is considered the happy medium.

Also, Microsoft products won't let you format a partition bigger than 32GB in FAT32, even though FAT32 can address 2 terabytes. They force you to either divide your drives into partitions 32GB or smaller or format in NTFS.

Keep in mind that NTFS partitions aren't readable by DOS/Win95/Win98/WinME, only NT-based OSs NT/2000/XP.
 
this drive used to be formatted in FAT32 though. do you think that could have been what rendered it unreadble to windows? even though i'd been using this drive, formatted in fat32 (80GB), for about a month under XP...?
 
lucid said:
this drive used to be formatted in FAT32 though. do you think that could have been what rendered it unreadble to windows?
Click to expand...

Nope, but now that its in NTFS, you're a lot less likely to suffer this sort of data loss.
 
alright

so now how can i reformat in NTFS using 4k clusters?
 
I dont know that actual steps, sorry. I always call my friends for the step by step on stuff I dont do very often.

Check out www.tomshardware.com

It's a great computer hardware site and they have some good tutorials.
 
Dolemite is correct about XP not allowing you to create Fat32 partitions larger than 32GB. This has nothing to do with any Fat32 limitation, its just that Microsoft wants people to start using NTFS. However a drive previously formated FAT32 larger than 32gig is SUPPOSED to be readable by XP (according to Microsoft's Tech site). So I'm not sure why it would become unreadable.

As for formating 4K, look for settings in the Disk Administrator. I have not played with this in XP so I'm just guessing. Otherwise you can use a program like Partition Magic to set whatever cluster size you want. However if this is a large drive designated for audio, then you will want a much larger cluster size than this. Small clusters are good for general use because they save disk space when you have lots of small files (like this in the OS directory). But if you have just a few very large files (like recorded audio) you will probably get better performance from larger clusters, 32K or 64K.
 
yes, this is an audio drive. i was recommended fat 32 with 32 k clusters...

is there anyway i can format it fat32 out of windows? or is this useless?
 
If you are positive that you have lost everything on your data drive, you can reformat it all FAT32 one of two ways. One way is you could remove the drive, hook it up to another computer running Win 98 or Win ME, and format it.

Another easier way would be find someone who is still running Win 98 or Win ME and have them make a Startup disk for you (done in Control Panel / add remove software I believe). If Win 98 is used, you will need to go on the web to Microsoft's site and download a newer version of FDISK (the original version in 98 has a problem with disk > 64 gig). I posted the exact location of that update in this forum some time ago. Then copy that new file onto your startup disk. Then boot the machine up from floppy and fdisk /format the drive.

If Microsoft is right, once you reboot your new OS should be able to read the drive.
 
hmmm... but the mystery of how it all got erased is still strange. it is a removable drive, and i often swap it with a misc. drive... could the audio drive have fucked up when it was out of the computer?
 
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