Format USB HD

[John Wildberger]

William,
Thanks for your effort. I tried all the various suggestions, but no success. 
With fdisk  I can create a partition table that seemingly split my 120G USB 
drive into two FAT32 partitions. On closer examination it has only changed 
the ID but leaves the disk without any formatting.
The problem of creating a FAT32 filesystem on this drive is still 
unresolved. I have to go back to my XP OS to recreate a NTFS filesystem and 
try to live with this until someone can show me a way to create a FAT32 file 
system.
It also seems that the whole "mounting" technology is still stuck in the 
timeframe of the last century where DOS ruled with supremacy.

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 10:34 PM
Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Format USB HD


John,


> mkfs.vfat is equivalent to mkdosfs. I belief that this does not create a
> fat32 file system.
I stand to be corrected, but I am reasonable sure that commands create
a FAT file system. I will look at it again to make sure
> The mount command
> "mount -t ntfs /dev/sda /mnt"
> gives the error message "wrong fs".

Correct, you are mounting FAT as ntfs.
>
> 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.
No, Linux don´t need a drive mounted for partitioning. Just fire fdisk
and point it to the drive. It should them guide you using the m key, I
believe. Ehh, it need to be seen by the kernel though, or in another
work, you need to see it on the dev directory


William
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