SUMMARY: Cannot copy more than 32GB of files to a 128GB memory stick formatted under FAT32 or exFAT despite the fact that I can format the stick and ChkDsk is showing the correct results after formatting (and also when less than 32GB of files are on the stick). I cannot use NTFS because this stick is designed to transfer files to an iPhone and the app will not handle NTFS. See below for details.
DETAILS:
I have a 128GB memory stick which is designed to quickly transfer files between a computer and an iPhone. One end is a USB and the other plugs into the iPhone's lightning port. This particular type is extremely common and looks like a "T" when you unfold it (Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07SB12JHG ).
While this stick is not especially fast when I copy Windows data to it, the transfer rate to my iPhone is much better than the wireless alternatives.
Normally I'd format a large memory stick or USB drive in NTFS, but the app used to transfer files to my iPhone ("CooDisk") will only handle exFAT and FAT32. I've tried both. For exFAT formatting, I've tried both Windows 7 and 10, and for FAT32 I used a free product from RidgeCrop consulting (I can give you the link if you want).
As with all USB storage devices, my stick is formatted as a single active partition.
I do not have a problem formatting. After formatting, ChkDsk seems happy with both FAT32 and exFAT. The CooDisk app works fine with either. After formatting, all the space is ostensibly available for files.
My problem arises when populating the stick with files.
Whenever I get beyond 32GB in total space, I have various problems. Either the copy will fail, or ChkDsk will fail. (After running ChkDsk in 'fix' mode, every file created beyond the 32GB limit will be clobbered.) Interestingly, when I use the DOS copy command with "/v" (verify) it will flag an error for files beyond the 32GB limit, although DOS XCopy with "/v" keeps on going. GUI methods also die at 32GB.
Out of sheer desperation, I wrote a script that uses GNU's cp for Windows. Now I can copy more than 32GB of files and ChkDsk flags no errors. However files beyond the 32GB limit end up being filled with binary zeros despite the fact that they appear as they should in a directory or Windows file explorer listing. (Weird, isn't it?)
I have also tried various allocation unit sizes from 4K all the way up to 64K and attempted this with three different Windows OSs (XP, Win7, and Win10).
Let me emphasize: there is no problem with the first 32GB of files copied to the stick regardless of: whether I use exFAT or FAT32; my method of copying; and my choice of AU size.
Finally, there is nothing in these directories that would bother a FAT32 or exFAT system: (a) file and directory names are short (well under 100 characters); (b) directory nesting is minimal (no more than 5 levels); (c) files are small (nothing close to a GB); and directories have relatively few files (nowhere close to 200, for those of you who recall the old FAT limit of 512 files per directory :)
The only platform I haven't yet tried is using an aging MacBook that someone gave to me. I'm not terribly good with Macs, but I would rather not be dependent on it (it's 13 years old, although MacBooks are built like tanks).
Also, is it possible that FAT32 and exFAT don't allow more than 32GB on an active partition (I can find no such limitation documented anywhere, in fact in my experience USB storage devices are always bootable - as was the original version of my stick)?
Any ideas??
I am grad student, and I am considering setting up my dream home workstation/art tool/entertainment device/all-purpose everything. I'm wondering if what I want to do is possible (and practical), and if so, get some suggestions and warnings from people who know more about virtualization and hypervisors than I do:
Aim: Set up a 2-4 headed computing station that is optimized for using different OS'sfor different tasks I do. I want to keep my work/play streams separated, and have control over the resources that each one is allowed. For example, one head would be Windows 10 for audiovisual work, media playing, and maybe some gaming. Another head would use Linux and be used mainly for data science (mostly R and Python), and some hosting for purely local use (such as running an instance of the Galaxy bioinformatics server, which I only plan to access locally).Finally, I want a VM that is purely devoted to web-browsing, probably some lightweight Linux distro.
I want each OS to have it's own keyboard and monitor(s), but ideally I want to copy-paste between OSs. The idea is to just swivel my chair to move between operating systems, or even to have one person using each.
What I think I need:
A hypervisor with PCI, USB, and network controller pass-through.
Two video cards,one each for my Windows and Linux workstations (with the web browsing VM using the on-chip CPU graphics). Obviously, a mobo and CPU that support full virtualization.
A USB card with multiple separate controllers, so that I can use a different controller for each OS. Something similar for network interface cards.
Separate SSDs for each OS and its apps.
Some sort of storage pool (probably ZFS based) to hold the bulk of my files, shared so I can access them from either guest. Ideally, I'd like to to be in a separate enclosure, but I don't trust eSATA cables (they seem to fail frequently) and care about speed of database access, so I'll probably put the drives inside the main case, even though that will make future migration more annoying.
Something like SPICE for KVM, so that I can copy and paste freely between OS's.
Is there anything I am overlooking?
What hypervisor or similar solution is best for what I want to do? I am leaning towards KVM, but am far from committed.I will consider paid solutions if there is a compelling reason to use them.
What are some pitfalls I should be wary of?
kvm will work here ideally, a lot of tutorials and lot of intel based configurations working like a charm
zfs can't share your data, u need nfs or samba share on host machine
Synergy software is for you.
Currently I develop on an extremely powerful machine: Pentium i7, 32 GB Ram, SSD, 1 Gb 1028-bit graphics card, etc.
What I'm trying to figure out is the proper way to test my applications and web pages simulating a less powerful computer. Is there any way to simulate a slower processor, less ram, slower hard drive, and weaker graphics card? I'm not sure if I missed anything else in terms of what else to simulate...
The only thing I've figured out so far is resolution, but that was as easy as changing my monitor resolution. Though, if there is a way to simulate less resolution without needing to change my actual screen resolution as well, that'd be great.
Download Windows Virtual PC.
And test you application in it. You can customize your configuration, everything like disk storage, ram memory etc.
Good application for application developers to test in different environments.
I suppose you could create a virtual machine on your computer. You could then vary how much RAM & processing power it has access to. You could boot this machine of a USB drive if you wanted to simulate a slower drive.
Excuse me for my lack of knowledge but I am really new to the Virtual world and have a few questions.
I work for a small charity who specialise in providing basic IT training. We have recently acquired a few Dell Poweredge 2650 servers and Dell desktops and we wish to offer both XP, Windows 7, Mac and Ubuntu training. I am looking at setting up a Virtual environment so that we can have a standard image for each OS (I currently use image files but it currently takes approximately 25mins to build each machine and multi-boot is not an option as the new machines have 20Gb disks).
The servers are all dual processor and we can purchase more memory(I need to justify the cost)
What are the memory requirements for
the Host?
How many VM's can I run
per server?
Can I run multiple instances of the same VM
Thanks in advance for your knowledge.
Darryn
You might be able to get away with a multi-boot option with those 20 gig disks; each OS will probably take no more than ten gigs for minimal installs, two OSes per machine isn't terrible. (Incidentally, look around for a group like FreeGeek in your area -- larger hard drives ought to be cheap for small sizes like 120-500 gigs.)
That said, virtualization might be just what you need, if you have a handful of pretty powerful machines.
I think between one and two gigabytes of host memory for every guest VM that you want to run would be very useful. At least in my experience, an Ubuntu image I gave 1024 megabytes to ran very quickly, but I didn't press it very far. Running Firefox or OpenOffice inside the VM would probably dictate more memory very quickly. Chrome seemed snappy.
So, if you've got 12 gigabytes of RAM, you might be able to get between four and twenty virtual machines hosted on the machine simultaneously, depending upon what your guests are doing.
As for disk space, if you use QEMU's -snapshot option, you ought to be able to save disk space. Each user could boot the same underlying disk image, but their own modifications would go into the 'snapshot' file. (I have no experience trying to do long-term system maintenance with this option, so it could be that all twenty of your users need to store service pack 2 contents when they upgrade in the future; I'd be scared of trying to modify the shared disk image once you've got snapshots of it running. Perhaps having everyone store 'personal documents' and the like in CIFS shares would make a ton of sense.)
The biggest hurdle will probably be Mac; because the Apple terms of service forbid running OS X on non-Apple hardware, you'll have to have some Apple machines around to run VirtualBox.
I've got a machine I'm going to be using for development, and it has two 7200 RPM 160 GB SATA HDs in it.
The information I've found on the net so far seems to be a bit conflicted about which things (OS, Swap files, Programs, Solution/Source code/Other data) I should be installing on how many partitions on which drives to get the most benefit from this situation.
Some people suggest having a separate partition for the OS and/or Swap, some don't bother. Some people say the programs should be on the same physical drive as the OS with the data on the other, some the other way around. Same with the Swap and the OS.
I'm going to be installing Vista 64 bit as my OS and regularly using Visual Studio 2008, VMWare Workstation, SQL Server management studio, etc (pretty standard dev tools).
So I'm asking you--how would you do it?
If the drives support RAID configurations in your BIOS, you should do one of the following:
RAID 1 (Mirror) - Since this is a dev machine this will give you the fault tolerance and peace of mind that your code is safe (and the environment since they are such a pain to put together). You get better performance on reads because it can read from both/either drive. You don't get any performance boost on writes though.
RAID 0 - No fault tolerance here, but this is the fastest configuration because you read and write off both drives. Great if you just want as fast as possible performance and you know your code is safe elsewhere (source control) anyway.
Don't worry about mutiple partitions or OS/Data configs because on a dev machine you sort of need it all anyway and you shouldn't be running heavy multi-user databases or anything anyway (like a server).
If your BIOS doesn't support RAID configurations, however, then you might consider doing the OS/Data split over the two drives just to balance out their use (but as you mentioned, keep the programs on the system drive because it will help with caching). Up to you where to put the swap file (OS will give you dump files, but the data drive is probably less utilized).
If they're both going through the same disk controller, there's not going to be much difference performance-wise no matter which way you do it; if you're going to be doing lots of VM's, I would split one drive for OS and swap / Programs and Data, then keep all the VM's on the other drive.
Having all the VM's on an independant drive would let you move that drive to another machine seamlessly if the host fails, or if you upgrade.
Mark one drive as being your warehouse, put all of your source code, data, assets, etc. on there and back it up regularly. You'll want this to be stable and easy to recover. You can even switch My Documents to live here if wanted.
The other drive should contain the OS, drivers, and all applications. This makes it easy and secure to wipe the drive and reinstall the OS every 18-24 months as you tend to have to do with Windows.
If you want to improve performance, some say put the swap on the warehouse drive. This will increase OS performance, but will decrease the life of the drive.
In reality it all depends on your goals. If you need more performance then you even out the activity level. If you need more security then you use RAID and mirror it. My mix provides for easy maintenance with a reasonable level of data security and minimal bit rot problems.
Your most active files will be the registry, page file, and running applications. If you're doing lots of data crunching then those files will be very active as well.
I would suggest if 160gb total capacity will cover your needs (plenty of space for OS, Applications and source code, just depends on what else you plan to put on it), then you should mirror the drives in a RAID 1 unless you will have a server that data is backed up to, an external hard drive, an online backup solution, or some other means of keeping a copy of data on more then one physical drive.
If you need to use all of the drive capacity, I would suggest using the first drive for OS and Applications and second drive for data. Purely for the fact of, if you change computers at some point, the OS on the first drive doesn't do you much good and most Applications would have to be reinstalled, but you could take the entire data drive with you.
As for dividing off the OS, a big downfall of this is not giving the partition enough space and eventually you may need to use partitioning software to steal some space from the other partition on the drive. It never seems to fail that you allocate a certain amount of space for the OS partition, right after install you have several gigs free space so you think you are fine, but as time goes by, things build up on that partition and you run out of space.
With that in mind, I still typically do use an OS partition as it is useful when reloading a system, you can format that partition blowing away the OS but keep the rest of your data. Ways to keep the space build up from happening too fast is change the location of your my documents folder, change environment variables for items such as temp and tmp. However, there are some things that just refuse to put their data anywhere besides on the system partition. I used to use 10gb, these days I go for 20gb.
Dividing your swap space can be useful for keeping drive fragmentation down when letting your swap file grow and shrink as needed. Again this is an issue though of guessing how much swap you need. This will depend a lot on the amount of memory you have and how much stuff you will be running at one time.
For the posters suggesting RAID - it's probably OK at 160GB, but I'd hesitate for anything larger. Soft errors in the drives reduce the overall reliability of the RAID. See these articles for the details:
http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200809#08
http://permabit.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/are-fibre-channel-and-scsi-drives-more-reliable/
You can't believe everything you read on the internet, but the reasoning makes sense to me.
Sorry I wasn't actually able to answer your question.
I usually run a box with two drives. One for the OS, swap, typical programs and applications, and one for VMs, "big" apps (e.g., Adobe CS suite, anything that hits the disk a lot on startup, basically).
But I also run a cheap fileserver (just an old machine with a coupla hundred gigs of disk space in RAID1), that I use to store anything related to my various projects. I find this is a much nicer solution than storing everything on my main dev box, doesn't cost much, gives me somewhere to run a webserver, my personal version control, etc.
Although I admit, it really isn't doing much I couldn't do on my machine. I find it's a nice solution as it helps prevent me from spreading stuff around my workstation's filesystem at random by forcing me to keep all my work in one place where it can be easily backed up, copied elsewhere, etc. I can leave it on all night without huge power bills (it uses <50W under load) so it can back itself up to a remote site with a little script, I can connect to it from outside via SSH (so I can always SCP anything I need).
But really the most important benefit is that I store nothing of any value on my workstation box (at least nothing that isn't also on the server). That means if it breaks, or if I want to use my laptop, etc. everything is always accessible.
I would put the OS and all the applications on the first disk (1 partition). Then, put the data from the SQL server (and any other overflow data) on the second disk (1 partition). This is how I'd set up a machine without any other details about what you're building. Also make sure you have a backup so you don't lose work. It might even be worth it to mirror the two drives (if you have RAID capability) so you don't lose any progress if/when one of them fails. Also, backup to an external disk daily. The RAID won't save you when you accidentally delete the wrong thing.
In general I'd try to split up things that are going to be doing a lot of I/O (such as if you have autosave on VS going off fairly frequently) Think of it as sort of I/O multithreading
I've observed significant speedups by putting my virtual machines on a separate disk. Whenever Windows is doing something stupid in the VM (e.g., indexing yet again), it doesn't thrash my Mac's disk quite so badly.
Another issue is that many tools (Visual Studio comes to mind) break in frustrating ways when bits of them are on the non-primary disk.
Use your second disk for big random things.