Format USB HD

[John Wildberger]

mkfs.vfat is equivalent to mkdosfs. I belief that this does not create a 
fat32 file system.
The mount command
"mount -t ntfs /dev/sda /mnt"
gives the error message "wrong fs".

It would also help if I could partition the USB drive into two partition. 
Partition Magic does not recognise USB drives, and partition software in 
Linux needs the drive to be mounted. Not having succeeded to have the drive 
mounted, I cannot find out if this would work.

John

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "William Muriithi" <william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>
To: <tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 02, 2008 7:19 PM
Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Format USB HD




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
>>
>>

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists