Format USB HD

[John Wildberger]

Christopher,

Since my last post I did a bit more experimenting and also a little bit of 
reading. As it stands now I succeeded in splitting my 120G USB Drive into 
two partitions. One with 90G that I formatted with NTFS, and a second one 
with 30G that I formatted as FAT32.
It appears that Windows cannot accept any FAT32 with more than 32G
This worked out quite well, and so I did not follow your instruction with 
the "-F 32" option. But I wonder if it would have overcome the 32G 
limitation. It is too late for me to try this, because now that I have a 
working system I am loath to start over again just to prove a point.
Thanks for your help,

John


-----Original Message ----- 
From: "Christopher Browne" <cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>
To: <tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 03, 2008 9:22 AM
Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Format USB HD


> 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.
> -- 
> 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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