[ale] FAT32 driver and big disk drives

[greg.freemyer at gmail.com (Greg Freemyer)]

Is FAT32 under SUSE 8.2 (2.4 kernel) reliable with a 250GB partition?

Is it likely more reliable with SUSE 9.2 (2.6 kernel), or something in between?

M$ claims FAT32 supports upto 8 TB under WinXP.

=== Background

I have a large tar backup tape (~200GB) made from an ext2 filesystem.
There are roughly 300 files, all 640MB each.  (Sized to fit on a CD).

I am trying to restore the tar backup to a newly formatted 250GB FAT32
partition.

Looking at the tar output (saved to a log file), everything is working
fine and my file sizes are correct.

Doing a "ls" on the filesystem shows that a number of the files are 0
bytes long.

Unfortunately, all 300 or so files comprise a single logical entity
that I need to access from a Windows box.

Linux cannot write to NTFS and none of Windows EXT2 drivers seem
reliable enough to use for this.

I guess my next attempt will be to get cygwin to read in the tape.

Thanks
Greg
--
Greg Freemyer