Problem with Partitioning HDD

[tirthasanyal]

Hi folks, recently I purchased one 80GB HDD by seagate. now while i went to partitioning every thing went smoothly except one glitche.
thie partition with 10% capacity created each allocation unit with 4096 bytes while the partition with 20% and 25% capacity made each allocation unit with 8192 & 16384 bytes. needless to say that such large allocation units definitely misuse the space available. Can u folks help me make all the partitions with 4096byte allocation unit. I am using FAT 32 file system.

[sba]

FAT32 follows a standard while creating clusters or allocation units based on disk size.
260MB - 8GB = 4KB clusters
8GB - 60GB = 8KB
60GB - 200GB = 16KB
> 200GB = 32KB
So when you create a partition with 10% of total space you are making a partition of approx. 7.45GB hence the 4KB sectors. As you increase the size of partition the cluster size increases as well.

If you want to use more flexible cluster size then use NTFS as file system that supports 512 bytes to 64KB sizes.

[infra_red_dude]

well you can also use partition magic to resize the cluster size.

[Keith Sebastian]

Use Windows disk management (winxp start menu > administrative tools) to reformat with 4K cluster size. Offcourse you'll lose all data when doing this, so backup.

Tip: Choose NTFS over FAT32 to better disk management wrt fragmentation and MFT sizes/placement.

-Keith

[a_dalui]

Use Norton Partition Manager for better partition management.