Format USB HD

William Muriithi william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Sat Aug 2 23:18:06 UTC 2008


John,

Okay, it seems you really need FAT file system. Have its advantage I
have to admit - portability. You can connect it to any DVD player with
a USB connection and it works, unlike NTFS. It sucks though if you
ever need to recover your data using tools like foremost.

Anyway, this is how you go about creating a fat file system on Linux.
(Assumes you want one large FAT partition

mkfs.vfat  /dev/sdX

Where sdX is the hard disk you want formatted.

Not, you will loose all data after that, so trend carefully.

After that, reboot just to make sure things worked alright as you
don´t want to start putting your data in a sick file system. Once it
come up, mount it as follows:

mount -t vfat /dev/sdx  /mnt

Through a couple of files on mnt directory to see what happen.
Regards,
William

2008/8/3 John Wildberger <wildberger-iRg7kjdsKiH3fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org>:
> Thanks for the various suggestions.
>
> I tried to format within XP os, VISTA os and got the error message :" The
> volume is too big for FAF32"
> In Linux I do not know what the command for mounting in NTFS mode is, and
> also do not know the command for creating a FAT32 file system.
> I don't need to preserve the data I have on the drive, in fact, I prefere to
> have a complete clean empty formated drive. I don't like to go via the route
> of using an OS that supports the NTFS , because the USB drive can be
> connected to different computers and one might not have this capability.
>
> John
>
>
> ---- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher Browne" <cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8 at public.gmane.orgm>
> To: <tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org>
> Sent: Saturday, August 02, 2008 8:12 AM
> Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Format USB HD
>
>
>> On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 6:16 AM, John Wildberger <wildberger-iRg7kjdsKiH3fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I have a 120G USB harddrive that is formatted with a NTFS filesystem. To
>>> use
>>> this drive with a Linux OS in read/write mode, I need this to be
>>> converted
>>> to a FAT32 file system.
>>> Any suggestion how to do this?
>>
>> The usual method would be:
>>
>> 1.  Mount in NTFS mode;
>> 2.  Copy all the data off to some place where you have 120G of
>> separate, writable storage
>> 3.  Unmount NTFS filesystem
>> 4.  Create FAT32 filesystem on the 120GB drive
>> 5.  Copy the data back from the place you preserved it
>>
>> You're not likely to find an "in place upgrade" mechanism; I'd be a
>> bit surprised if Microsoft, maker of both of those filesystems, has
>> one...
>> --
>> http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
>> "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and
>> expecting different results." -- assortedly attributed to Albert
>> Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Rita Mae Brown, and Rudyard Kipling
>> --
>> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
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> --
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> TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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