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I have a 320gb usb2 disk with a single 320gb fat32 partition correctly opened and read by windows 10.

I needed to transfer its data to a 500gb usb2 disk but I was not able to format it in fat32 neither on windows nor in linux.

I managed to clone (with the clonezilla liveCD) the 320gb disk over the 500gb one and also the partition was expanded to the full disk capacity (and from linux and from my wii console I can read those data fine)

Despite this, both windows 8.1 and 10 refuse to mount the partition that is reported as RAW Can this be caused by this bug in gParted? Should I try using TestDisk to fix this as suggested to this other question?

sigmud
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  • testdisk is usually pretty good. But why couldn't you format the new 500GB usb drive? Is the partition table (MBR/gpt) ok? Or is it un-partitioned? Maybe windows doesn't like un-partitioned drives & calls them raw...? Do you know exactly how clonezilla copied it? – Xen2050 Mar 17 '17 at 05:48
  • The new 500GB usb drive was originally formatted as ntfs. Testdisk was not able to identify the partition – sigmud Mar 19 '17 at 07:15
  • as I was saying: Windows was allowing me to format only in NTFS or exFAT, but I needed FAT32 Testdisk was not able to identify the partition

    Finally I decided to download a disk editor tool (from disk-editor.org) and I compared the original FAT32 boot sector with the one of the cloned and enlarged disk (offset 32256) I verify that the aforementioned gparted bug was actually present, so I changed the hex code 0x78 to 0xEB and the partition was identified and mounted at once. Problem solved!

     – sigmud Mar 19 '17 at 07:39
  • Interesting, I was unaware of disk editors like that, looks like a mix of hex editor and disk layout info tool. And, I'm not 100% sure on how much they like "bugs" on superuser, but you could probably paste your comment as an answer, since it answered the question. – Xen2050 Mar 21 '17 at 21:06

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the aforementioned gparted bug was actually the one preventing the microsoft OSes from identifying the FAT32 partition, so I changed the hex code 0x78 to 0xEB as you can see in blue in this snapshot (btw: also the original volume label is displayed at offset 32328 - just before I changed also that to avoid confusion) fixing bug in the hexadecimal partition editor

and the partition was identified and mounted at once by windows 10. Problem solved!

sigmud
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