EOS 1D and FAT

My brand new 15 year old Canon 1D uses FAT. That means it can only format and recognize a 2GB partition. Is there any way to get the camera to recognize my entire 4GB or 8GB CF card?

4 GB maybe, if you open a command line window (worked with XP; may not with later versions of MS operating systems) and use the FORMAT command with switches /FS:FAT and /A:64K. So at a command prompt enter

FORMAT X: /FS:FAT /A:64K

Thanks. The command you provided runs. It just limits partition size to 2GB. 64K cluster size works, but yields a 2gb partition. If I try to go bigger on the cluster size, it throws an error. "Cluster size too big for FAT file system." Using Win7.

Jon wrote in post #17893731
4 GB maybe, if you open a command line window (worked with XP; may not with later versions of MS operating systems) and use the FORMAT command with switches /FS:FAT and /A:64K. So at a command prompt enter

FORMAT X: /FS:FAT /A:64K

with your 4 GB card. FAT doesn't accept allocation units greater than 64K, so a 4 GB card is the max. I've done this with my D60, which has the same limitation, and Win 10 shows the command-line FORMAT recognizing those switches, so it should work for anything up to that.

Don't use windows but can you specify fat32 or is that implicit these days

Rod

I thought for sure my 1D would use 4GB with a FAT32 format.

I had some 4GB micro-drives I got to use in the 1D way back when. I feel like i used exactly the method Jon wrote about above, but at the time I was running Win 98 or XP

Ok, guys. Thanks. I got it. The 'problem' was trying to run that command on a card already formatted by the 1D. My computer then thought it was only a 2GB card. When I formatted the card in the 1DII first, the computer could see it was a 4GB card. I probably could have just as easily formatted it fat32 in the computer and THEN moved to the above command. Anyway, my brand new 15 year old camera can now use all 4GB of my 4GB cards. Now I can get twice as many photos on card. That may come in handy at 8 fps! Thanks, a heap, everyone!

Follow-up:
I tried formatting fat32 in the computer first. Win7 only recognizes the original 1D cardsize of 2GB. If I format the card in the 1DII first, the computer can see it is a 4GB card. Then the above command works just fine. I think that is a Windows non-backward-compatible issue. Anyway, I now have all 4 of my 4GB cards formatted so the 1D can use all the space on them. Thanks again.

RodS57 wrote in post #17893848
Don't use windows but can you specify fat32 or is that implicit these days

Rod

Thanks for the input, Rod. I believe default for the last 10 years or so is NTFS.

With this issue, on this camera (1D classic), fat32 is the problem. The camera does not recognize a fat32 card as being formatted, so it overwrites it with FAT, and the default 16k cluster size, which only allows for a 2GB max. Reformatting, using FAT and a 64K cluster size allows for a 4GB card to be used at full capacity.

Bassat wrote in post #17893980
Thanks for the input, Rod. I believe default for the last 10 years or so is NTFS.

With this issue, on this camera (1D classic), fat32 is the problem. The camera does not recognize a fat32 card as being formatted, so it overwrites it with FAT, and the default 16k cluster size, which only allows for a 2GB max. Reformatting, using FAT and a 64K cluster size allows for a 4GB card to be used at full capacity.

Just about every card or jump drive that you buy that is already formatted (I haven't seen any that were not) has the fat32 file system because support is pretty much universal. If you are really curious about the file system type then copy a file that has a longer name than 8 characters (ie: thisisafile.txt ). If, aftercopying, the visible name of the file on the card hasn't changed then you have fat32.

CDS was right that fat32 was introduced around the time of win98. It was a Microsoft attempt to support long file names.

And yes, all versions of Windows starting with XP use NTFS not sure about win ME.

Rod

NTFS is a characteristic of the Windows NT family. I believe it was introduced with Windows NT 3.1, but certainly was the Windows 3.5 standard and has been so ever since. Windows ME was (an unlamented) part of the 16-bit Windows family along with Win 3.1, Win 95, and Win98. It met its end when Microsoft released Windows 2000, which unified the Win9x GUI and the WinNT kernel. But there's always been the option of formatting media using any of the earlier/other MS file systems. Glad that blasting away the artificial partitioning took care of it for you.

Jon wrote in post #17894792
NTFS is a characteristic of the Windows NT family. I believe it was introduced with Windows NT 3.1, but certainly was the Windows 3.5 standard and has been so ever since. Windows ME was (an unlamented) part of the 16-bit Windows family along with Win 3.1, Win 95, and Win98. It met its end when Microsoft released Windows 2000, which unified the Win9x GUI and the WinNT kernel. But there's always been the option of formatting media using any of the earlier/other MS file systems. Glad that blasting away the artificial partitioning took care of it for you.

Oops! I forgot about the win NT versions. I can remember the interview where Bill Gates said a computer would never need more than 640k of ram. Definitely getting old I am.

Rod

Jon wrote in post #17894792
It met its end when Microsoft released Windows 2000

oddly I came across a Win2k server today - lord know what it does, I'm hoping to quietly ignore it while migrating the rest of the network to a decent structure...