I need to make a VFAT file system to re install XP on to
using linux
with out a working fat32 file system the XP installer
chocks on the new hard drive and locks up
regardless of what the parttion table says it trys to use more of the hard drive than the BIOS in the computer
can handle
I Know I Know you say upgrade the bios but not even the OEM (gateway)of this computer can tell me what file to
download to upgrade the bios
BUT
IF and only if I can get a working file system on the hard drive in the parttion I want XP installed to the XP
installer dose the right thing

so how do I make a fat32 file system on a 50gig parttion
with a linux command

BTW
the linux distro is slack 11
( being installed right now )

"so how do I make a fat32 file system on a 50gig parttion
with a linux command "

Use the command mkfs.vfat. Here are the man pages for mkfs.vfat

http://linux.die.net/man/8/mkfs.vfat

--------------
Steve Stites

OK BUT
I need the numbers for the -s,-S and -R options
I have reinstalled linux 8 times trying to get these numbers right
the XP installer collbers linux if these numbers are wrong
I did it last year but have I forgotten the numbers

Aren't you just pushing your luck? Windows doesn't normally accept fat32 partitions larger than 32GB.

MAYBE ? but only maybe
If I give it more than one dos type parttion it combines them into one parttion and dies

Weird... Anyway, do you really need to make two? I imagine you could start out with only one and add a second one afterwards? Or is there a reason that you do need to have all of the space at once?

Sounds odd - I've never given any formatting options to mkfs; that's it's job to sort them out depending on the size. I haven't used vfat for years for an install, but should work o.k.
Windoze will use any sized FAT32 partition you throw at it - it just won't create one bigger than 32 Gig. And even that wasn't true for the installer - it didn't suffer the same limitation. But as I said, been a while since I tried - certainly not on XP.

I generally just leave 20 Gig at the front of every system I build just in case I need to install 'doze later - you are aware that ntfsprogs contains mkntfs ???.

Microsoft limited XP so it can not create nor format FAT32 partitions >32GB. It has no problem read/writing to larger if they already exist.

IMHO it is best to use NTFS for the main windows OS partition and create a seperate FAT32 or NTFS partition to share files. Writing to NTFS is good but a seperate partition protects windows in case something happens.

Make sure the FAT32 partition ID is set to 0xc. BTW many answers can be found by searching the website. Be sure to substitute for the actual drive/partition you want to format.
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Mkdosfs

In addition, it is also simpler to install windows first and leave unallocated free space on the hard drive for linux.

every time I have made a dosfs with out setting the -s and -S it made a file system with a logcal sector size of 0bytes
the problem is that if I don't give it a parttion to use
it thinks the parttion is 1gig larger than the computers bios thinks it is and it chocks and dies
the bios thinks the hard drive is 131gig
the windows installer thinks the hard drive is 132 gig
well I think it's working now