Format USB HD

[William Muriithi]

Correction on previous post.

I meant throw not through

William

2008/8/3 William Muriithi <william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>:
> 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 at gmail.com>
>> 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
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