Boot device 64Gb USB

[Smoothe]

Hi all,

 

I have looked for the answer to this question but couldn’t find anything definitive.

 

what is the technical reason for the usb boot device being 32GB or smaller?

[trurl]

32 is maximum size for FAT32 

[Smoothe]

Thankyou that was all I wanted to know  I had assumed ext 4

[limetech]

35 minutes ago, trurl said:

32 is maximum size for FAT32 

Not technically.  32GB is max for FAT32 with 16K cluster size, which is the max that Windows let's you set.  However third party tools allow you to format FAT32 with larger sector size, and that is exactly what our USB Flash Creator tool does.

[limetech]

49 minutes ago, Smoothe said:

what is the technical reason for the usb boot device being 32GB or smaller?

To answer your question: we used to describe a "manual" method for preparing a USB flash device to contain bootable Unraid OS.  The first step was to plug device into Windows PC and format it.  Using this method, if Windows sees device greater than 32GB it will not offer FAT32 as a file system type, instead it will offer exFAT.  But (at present) the 'syslinux' tool which is used to actually make the device bootable, does not support exFAT.  Therefore the restriction of 32GB.

 

But these days, if you use the USB Flash Creator Tool, you can use larger flash devices.  Hope this makes sense

[Smoothe]

Thankyou,  thats exactly the detail I wanted, I appreciate the clarification

[snowmangoh]

On 10/24/2019 at 5:05 PM, limetech said:

To answer your question: we used to describe a "manual" method for preparing a USB flash device to contain bootable Unraid OS.  The first step was to plug device into Windows PC and format it.  Using this method, if Windows sees device greater than 32GB it will not offer FAT32 as a file system type, instead it will offer exFAT.  But (at present) the 'syslinux' tool which is used to actually make the device bootable, does not support exFAT.  Therefore the restriction of 32GB.

 

But these days, if you use the USB Flash Creator Tool, you can use larger flash devices.  Hope this makes sense

This is great info, thank you! I found it searching to see if using the flash creator tool I could use a larger flash drive size... Including that info on the https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Changing_The_Flash_Device page might be useful to anyone who has the same question. Thanks!!