Ardent Meridian… incoherent rambletastic techno-babble …

Microsoft really confuses me sometimes.  It really shouldn’t, I worked there for 8 years and saw enough bone-headed decisions in that time to last me several lifetimes.  Even so, every so often I come across something that is so illustrative of restrictive, myopic or just plain backwards thinking that it tends to make my blood boil.

This week has been replete with such issues, mostly centering on brain-dead management of disks and the raw hassle that is trying to get a bare-metal restorable backup of the operating system and provisioning new disks the way I want to.

The backup issue is infuriating.  Under XP, while it was still a hassle (in that you had to use third-party software to do it), tools like Acronis TrueImage could be relied upon to make creating a full system image in a quick, reliable and painless way.  It should not be necessary to resort to third-party software to do this, but at least what is available works properly.

The built in backup function in Vista Ultimate requires that I re-install my operating system in order to perform the restore.  Better than nothing I suppose, but hardly ideal.  And the way the system provisions disks by default easily renders them invisible to some of the third-party tools.  Now that is not really Microsoft’s fault, but it would not be an issue at all if the system had a bare-metal recovery capability as standard!

I lost a hard drive this week.  In itself this was no big deal; I have backups of my data and it was not the system drive that failed.  But I decided to replace it, and another drive of the same brand (and bought at the same time) with two new drives.  This is, of course, all fine, until I decide that I will put a 500GB FAT32 partition on one of the drives, so that that area can be shared with OS X.

And what do I find?

Vista is not capable of formatting FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB!  Windows ME can do this without issue, but Vista cannot?!  Obviously this is a design decision and and artificial limitation in Vista designed to push people towards NTFS.  I would much rather use NTFS, but the reality is the only thing that can write to it properly is Windows, and I want to share a drive with OS X.

No mystical incantation of commands fed to FORMAT.EXE will do anything other than waste an hour claiming to format and then failing at the end claiming the drive is too big or the clusters are too small or some other nonsense.

A couple of third-party tools fail to be able to format the drive at all, so either Vista has some weirdness going on that I do not know about, or those tools just do not work properly.

In the end I have to resort to booting into OS X and formatting the 500GB FAT32 partition from there.

It works, it is fine, but why on Earth should I have go through such silly gyrations merely to format a drive in a format that Vista happily reads and writes at capacities up to 2 TB?  If I want a drive in FAT32 format let me have it!  You had to go out of your way to STOP me, and this makes no sense to me at all.

Fine, make NTFS the default (it is my preference and default for a non-shared volume), add all kinds of dire warnings about the consequences of large volumes on non-NTFS partitions if it makes you feel better, but if I really want FAT32 for whatever reason (why do you even care?) let me have it!

It is patently ridiculous that I have to use a competitors product to format a drive with a Microsoft owned formatting specification.

This is not how you improve your image or make your software more widely used.