Smallest FAT32 Partition

windows linux filesystems fat32 disk-partitioning
mustafa picture mustafa · Dec 7, 2011 · Viewed 12.8k times · Source

I need to create a small partition image (a few MB) with FAT32 filesystem. I came up some contradictory info on the Internet about the minimum size limit of a FAT32 partition.

When I tried to mkfs a 5MB partition as FAT32 in Linux, I get a warning since it's too small. Though, it writes something in it. (I'm not sure if it's valid) And when I try to format a 5MB partition as FAT32 with diskpart in Windows, it simply fails.

How small can a FAT32 partition be?

thanks

Answer

Marco Bax picture Marco Bax · Dec 7, 2011

FAT32 requires a partion of atleast 33,548,800 bytes (32763 KB). See a list of FAT size limits on Wikipedia.

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