Windows UI for disk formatting was a temporary solution that stuck for 30 years

[Alfonso Maruccia]

Why it matters: There is nothing more enduring than a "temporary" code patchwork for a vast software project. Former Microsoft employee Dave Plummer provides yet another demonstration of this golden rule in software development.

Windows is well known for its almost eerie ability to host a multitude of conflicting GUI paradigms within the same graphical shell. This trend has persisted for decades and is likely to continue with whatever future Windows edition Microsoft is currently developing. However, a specific aspect of the user interface was hastily assembled as a temporary measure until a more refined version could be implemented.

According to well-known Microsoft developer Dave Plummer, the "Format" dialog box was quickly put together in late 1994. At that time, Redmond was busy porting the "bajillion lines of code" from the Windows 95 user interface to Windows NT, as Plummer recently explained on X. The Format GUI was one area where Windows 95 and NT differed enough to warrant a new, custom UI.

The programmer sketched the options for the dialog box on a piece of paper and then created a "simple vertical stack" of all the choices he had prepared (capacity, file system, label, cluster size, etc.) in VC++2.0. Plummer admits that the UI "wasn't elegant," but it would at least provide functional capability until the "elegant UI" could be implemented.

I wrote this Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.

We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from… pic.twitter.com/PbrhQe0n3K

– Dave W Plummer (@davepl1968) March 24, 2024

Thirty years later, consumer Win32 operating systems and the NT technology have been fused together, yet the format dialog box of Windows 11 remains the "temporary" solution Plummer sketched on a piece of paper. Programmers should always be careful when implementing a temporary solution in a much larger software project, the coder says.

Plummer also made some arbitrary choices about the largest possible size of a FAT-based volume. The FAT32 file system introduced with Windows 95 uses a 32-bit field to count sectors, thus providing a maximum size of 2 terabytes for a single FAT32 volume.

The disk format tool integrated into Windows NT only supports volume sizes up to 32 gigabytes, a value Plummer chose all by himself to try to avoid wasting too much storage space with larger cluster sizes. Microsoft clearly decided to embed the original Format UI in the final version of Windows NT 4.0, and the arbitrary choices made by a single developer "on a rainy Thursday" are still with us after all these years.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/102390-windows-ui-disk-formatting-temporary-solution-stuck-30.html

 

[m4a4]

As a coder, yup. Sometimes placeholder becomes permanent lol

 

[yRaz]

I don't see any issue with it. It's simple and functional, why does it need to be fancy?

 

[opckieran]

I don't see any issue with it. It's simple and functional, why does it need to be fancy?

Think of all the starving ad companies in {Insert Country Here}!

 

[Starfals]

I don't see any issue with it. It's simple and functional, why does it need to be fancy?

That's what I said about the Nvidia control panel (and Windows 11) too.. But people keep saying how wrong I am. I dunno, people love new looks. If it's more than 7 years old, people usually demand a new version/updated look. Even if its not needed. Sometimes they even make the new thing worse than the old one. Look at Windows 11. So many missing things, for the sake of being new... My dream is to keep everything, just make it look better (or higher ress, and only if its really needed)

P.s. I often miss my Android 4.4 look for tablets+phones btw, also number 7. Now that we go pass 7, its getting weird again.

 

[kiwigraeme]

I don't see any issue with it. It's simple and functional, why does it need to be fancy?

You work with PCs ,
For the punter in the street , buys a disk drive ( let's forget about PATA slave.master pins ) , make it easier a SATA drive , throws in , hooks up connector and power . Boots PC hoping to see that lovely 16Gb . Where is it . Googles . Right click Manage . Oh still have to format - options given WTF .
So much for Plug and play . Up there with MBR getting F'd up , or needing to do reg edits
Isn't windows to become without a register ? - suppose will have an encrypted place for keys. use of trial periods etc

Then punter heads to Amazon leaves a 1 star review as not 16Gbs

TBF Probably about another layer down - But M/S didn't make it easy for average user

 

[human7]

As a coder, yup. Sometimes placeholder becomes permanent lol

In my experience, it's rare for the placeholder not to become permanent (or at least last a couple of years). And thus, I often push back against any "temporary" solution with the simple message to the managers: if you can't prioritize the time for us to make the permanent solution now, you won't in the future either, and thus the temporary will become the permanent.

Management usually says that's fair and then goes for the "temporary" solution anyways. At least I'm getting paid for it.

 

[takaozo]

And poor old me thought that FAT32 32GB limit was some strange shlt in Windows filesystem, 'coz Linux don't care about this.

 

[VariableSpike]

It works well enough, and anyone requiring more options will just use Diskpart (or disk management if they decide that they want to hate themselves that day with how clunky, slow and feature reduced it is vs just using diskpart)

 

[yRaz]

You work with PCs ,
For the punter in the street , buys a disk drive ( let's forget about PATA slave.master pins ) , make it easier a SATA drive , throws in , hooks up connector and power . Boots PC hoping to see that lovely 16Gb . Where is it . Googles . Right click Manage . Oh still have to format - options given WTF .
So much for Plug and play . Up there with MBR getting F'd up , or needing to do reg edits
Isn't windows to become without a register ? - suppose will have an encrypted place for keys. use of trial periods etc

Then punter heads to Amazon leaves a 1 star review as not 16Gbs

TBF Probably about another layer down - But M/S didn't make it easy for average user

Said person has no business installing a hard drive then because no amount of GUI engineering is going to tell them that harddrives aren't plug and play. Further, an app isn't going to explain master/slave to them if they don't already understand it and they're likely to break something.

You can't engineer away stupidity because the world just makes a better *****. I'd rather have something simple and functional rather than something that someone will find away to mess up eventually anyway

 

[BabyFaceLee]

On a related bit of software...being the saddo that I am, I used to enjoy watching the disk defrag tool going to work with all the squares changing colour and 'moving'. [sigh]

 

[passingposeidon]

It works well enough, and anyone requiring more options will just use Diskpart (or disk management if they decide that they want to hate themselves that day with how clunky, slow and feature reduced it is vs just using diskpart)

Disk Management does have the advantage that a regular joe can use it ... I typed diskpart and I'm just staring at a blinking cursor, I have no idea what to do. Disk Management I can just select my new drive, format it, job done.

 

[wiyosaya]

You work with PCs ,
For the punter in the street , buys a disk drive ( let's forget about PATA slave.master pins ) , make it easier a SATA drive , throws in , hooks up connector and power . Boots PC hoping to see that lovely 16Gb . Where is it . Googles . Right click Manage . Oh still have to format - options given WTF .
So much for Plug and play . Up there with MBR getting F'd up , or needing to do reg edits
Isn't windows to become without a register ? - suppose will have an encrypted place for keys. use of trial periods etc

Then punter heads to Amazon leaves a 1 star review as not 16Gbs

TBF Probably about another layer down - But M/S didn't make it easy for average user

After having sold some HDs that I securely erased on Ebay recently, you might be surprised at the fact that some people, who claim they know what they are doing, have no clue as to how to get Windows to even recognize a drive, much less then formatting it. Your scenario is more realistic than you think and even, IMO, applies to some people that claim "I know what I am doing."

I had two people, one of which claimed "I know what I am doing" return drives that they said "does not work." When I got them back, I tested them, found nothing wrong with them, updated the listings to tell the people who "know what they are doing" how to get them to work, and then relisted and sold them - with no subsequent complaints.

Its even more complicated with recent versions of Windows for blank drives or drives that have been securely erased. You MUST run Disk Management first and give the drive an ID before Windows will even recognize the drive. Once it's recognized, then you can format it and use it.

 

[Shirley Dulcey]

FAT32 can support volumes larger than 32 GB, but no matter what the size of the volume is, individual files are limited to 2 GB, or 4 GB if large file support is present. For that reason, Microsoft's preferred solution for larger volumes is to format them as exFAT or NTFS. Those file systems have a theoretical file size limit of 16 exabytes (2**64), though existing implementations have lower limits. Current versions of the format dialog support formatting large exFAT and NTFS volumes; exFAT didn't exist when the dialog was created so it was obviously added later.

 

[VariableSpike]

Disk Management does have the advantage that a regular joe can use it ... I typed diskpart and I'm just staring at a blinking cursor, I have no idea what to do. Disk Management I can just select my new drive, format it, job done.

True, but it doesn't let you do much (it will often grey things out for stupid reasons, and doesn't give you a good balance between usability and making sure you can't f something up), whereas diskpart has got pretty good options with lots of help documentation where for each step of the command it can tell you what it can do (like if you type help CREATE, it will tell you what it can do with that keyword, but if you type help CREATE PARTITION, then it will give you actual info as to the options for what types of partition you can make, and so on)

Of course, easiest method of all is just using gparted, but I have had a few moments where it doesn't quite play ball with NTFS drives, and there are moments where you don't have access to only a command line (say you are launching from the windows install media) and knowing diskpart is a benefit, its one of those "hidden" windows utilities like robocopy that are actually quite useful, even if their terminal UI makes them a tad clunky.