My Fun with File Systems on USB attached Drives on the BeyonWiz DP-S1

I now use a 160GB USB drive for watching movies as I got sick of trying to shuffle things around on smaller flash drives.

I noticed that the BeyonWiz (on firmware 01.05.261) would navigate and play the movies perfectly but was not able to delete the files. It would not display any error message (a bug) but it would clearly fail.

Later I tried to move some files from the internal drive to the USB drive and at that stage there was a brief popup message telling me the drive was read only (whatever that meant).

Anyway it turns out that the BeyonWiz can read (but not write) NTFS formatted drives!

My next trick was to try to reformat the drive with "FAT32". Windows didn't have any option for FAT32 so I used a command prompt to kick off "format.exe", it failed at the end of the format with a message "The volume is too big for FAT32" (which is not true so obviously a WinXP SP3 bug!).

Apparently there are many utilities available to format drives to FAT32 and I used ones called "SwissKnife". While I found the interface a bit "average" it did the job.

I copied a few movies to this drive and attached it to be BeyonWiz which didn't like this at all, it showed many files and folders with random characters in their names. I nearly gave up at this stage but eventually noticed that the BeyonWiz had an option to format external drives so I gave it a go. It successfully formatted the drive to FAT32 and this was OK for WinXP also.

If I had to guess, I'd say the BeyonWiz has some limitations on the allocation unit size and would recommend formatting any new drive to FAT32 on the BeyonWiz. I have read (but haven't tested) that you can't write to a drive unless it was formatted with the BeyonWiz...