FAT32 incompatibility?

The NorthQ 7000/7100 uses some special version of the FAT32 file system that is not 100% compatible with the FA32 specification. Of course they are in their full right to do whatever they want, but it is a bit strange not to follow the FAT32 specification.

Anyway. this is how I found out about this:

	I prepared an 60GB hard-disk with Seagate's DiscWizard Starter Edition. When I made a Chkdsk on it before inserting it into the NorthQ, this is how it looked:
	I then inserted it into the NorthQ, and pushed the power on button.
	When it had started OK, I just pressed the power button again to turn it off. So I did not do anything with the disk except allowing the NorthQ to do whatever it does with a new hard-disk (I think it initializes the area which is used for the Timeslip function and some more initializations. I had the Timeslip setup to be 120min in XP quality when I did this test).
	Then I removed the hard-disk and inserted it into the PC again.
	When I made a Chkdsk on it again, this is how it looked:

As you can see ("The size of the \SYS.DAT entry is not valid."), the NorthQ has already made something that a Windows 2000 computer thinks is against the FAT32 standard.

I then looked at the (hidden) files that were on the hard-disk using the dir command. This is what I found:

So the total file-size is (136734310 + 100663296)/1024/1024/1024 GB, which is ~ 1.36GB.

But if I looked at the properties for the disk, it looked like this:

So the total amount of used space on the disk is 5.36GB. But as you saw above, the dir command just says 1.36GB. So the "missing" data here is 5.36-1.36 = 4.00GB!!

So if I had to take a guess, it has something to do with the 4GB max file-size on a FAT32 file-system. They have probably "invented" a way to get around this limitation. The bad things about this is that the file-system won't be compatible with the PC any more . So you cannot copy files from the NorthQ hard-disk to your PC without some special software.

Fortunately, NorthQ have now released a software tool for Windows called PvrDiskUtil that can be used to copy files from the NorthQ file system! For more information about this tool, look here.

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