“Empty Partition!” in Mac after created that with Disk Utility

Question

I just got a new hard drive yesterday, 2TB, and copied across all the files I needed, into two partitions in the new 2TB Disk, that I created in Disk Utility (command palimpsest). One was 500GB and the other was 1TB. They were both FAT32, as they needed to be read by Linux, MacOSX and Windows. So I transferred data to the partitions respectively, and when I plugged the hard drive into the Mac Machine, it just said there was nothing there at all. Back to the Ubuntu machine, and I looked around in Disk Utility to see that the type was FAT32, but the partition type was showing Empty(0x00) .

Tried to change it in the Edit partition Button but no avail. Gparted also doesn't recognize them either. I cannot mount and view the files and I Don't want to wipe it and start again, as it took over 7 hours to transfer the data.

Anyone got any ideas?

Answer 1

FAT32 file system has size limitations. You cannot create a FAT32 partition greater than 32 gigabytes (GB). In addition, you cannot store a file larger than 4 GB on a FAT32 partition.

^{Source: Microsoft}

Check here for more info

Beyond 32GB

Despite FAT32’s shortcomings in terms of maximum file size limits, lack of ACLs, and disk quotas support. Unfortunately, when the user wants to prepare a drive for use in this fashion, there is one major problem: Windows cannot format drives and partitions larger than 32GB in FAT32.

You may even consider making a partition sized at 32GB initially and then resizing it to fill the rest of the empty space. But within Windows, using the basic storage tools to resize operations is not supported on file systems other than NTFS.¹

^{1Source:techrepublic.com}