Format USB HD

[Christopher Browne]

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 8:13 AM, John Wildberger <wildberger-iRg7kjdsKiH3fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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.

That's correct; fdisk does *one thing*, namely controlling partitions.
 It does not establish the data format of the filesystems on those
partitions.

> The problem of creating a FAT32 filesystem on this drive is still
> unresolved.

You use mkfs.vfat to do that.

Here's an online manual page for it...
http://linux.die.net/man/8/mkfs.vfat

Note that you'd run it with "-F 32" to indicate creation of a FAT32 filesystem.

Look for /sbin/mkfs.vfat

> It also seems that the whole "mounting" technology is still stuck in the
> timeframe of the last century where DOS ruled with supremacy.

I'd go along with the notion that *partitioning* is still stuck there;
the way we "slice" disks into partitions is generally still based on
the MS-DOS partitioning scheme (e.g. - 4 primary partitions, with
possible more logical partitions inside some of those).  (Aside: Note
that the BSD guys tend to use a different way of handling partitions
where they split disks into what are actually called "slices," which
give them a bit more flexibility than the DOS model offers.  Not that
this fundamentally matters if you only have a couple of partitions...)

Of course, the way "mount" works dates back pretty much to the 1970s,
and it's not evident to me that the nature of the problems have
changed so much that there's anything broken about that.

Arguably, it might be nice to have a mount command that is a bit more
intelligent about detecting filesystem types, though the need for that
is really an artifact of things like getting forced to use a
Windows-compatible format.
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