fat32 discovery problems

**neillyoung** · February 23rd, 2011

I have an external hard drive that is formatted to fat32 that literally takes hours for Ubuntu to recognize is there any way to speed this up?

**coldraven** · February 23rd, 2011

Could be that the drive is failing.
Look at System>Admin>Disk Utility, select your USB drive and see if "Smart Data" tells you anything useful.
Does it take as long when plugged into another PC?

**neillyoung** · February 24th, 2011

No. I have a windows 7 laptop that I plug it into quite often and takes no more than 3 seconds for autoplay to pop up and everything works fine.

**neillyoung** · February 24th, 2011

could there be some kind of driver/kernel i need to install for large usb disks to work?
I use smaller (4gb) flash drives with it all the time.

**coldraven** · February 25th, 2011

It should work without any drivers or kernel mods.
I have a 1TB USB drive that came with FAT32 and it worked fine.
However there is a 4GB file size limit with FAT32 so I formated it to NTFS so that I could store DVDs on it.
Maybe someone else can give advice. When you are in Win7 can you run chkdsk on it?
Maybe it just has a corrupt file that confuses Linux.