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bmcws 07-20-2010 01:22 PM
fdisk change patition system id _after_ mkfs.ext3 OK?
 
Hello,

I've a new external usb drive that was shipped formatted fat32. I wanted to convert this to ext3; so I performed a mkfs.ext3. I then noticed that fdisk was still reporting the usb drive as fat32 (even after reboot), but mount was reporting ext3: so I fdisk'ed the drive and change the partition's system id to 83 (Linux).

Is this order OK? Will I run into problems?

Thanks,

Bernard

onebuck 07-20-2010 01:40 PM
Hi,

Normal would be to use 'cfdisk' or 'fdisk' to delete the old partition(s) then create a new partition with the desired type. Write the partition table to the device then exit. You should update the partition table by the use of 'partprobe' to update from the changes;
Quote:
excerpt from 'man partprobe';

NAME
partprobe - inform the OS of partition table changes

SYNOPSIS
partprobe [-d] [-s] [devices...]

DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents briefly the partprobe command.

partprobe is a program that informs the operating system kernel of partition table changes, by
requesting that the operating system re-read the partition table.

OPTIONS
This program uses short UNIX style options.

-d Don't update the kernel.

-s Show a summary of devices and their partitions.

-h Show summary of options.

-v Show version of program.

SEE ALSO
parted(8).
You can then format the partition with the filesystem of choice with mkfs;

Quote:
excerpt 'man mkfs';
NAME

mkfs - build a Linux file system SYNOPSIS

mkfs [ -V ] [ -t fstype ] [ fs-options ] filesys [ blocks ] DESCRIPTION

mkfs is used to build a Linux file system on a device, usually a hard disk partition. filesys is either the device name (e.g. /dev/hda1, /dev/sdb2) or the mount point (e.g. /, /usr, /home) for the file system. blocks is the number of blocks to be used for the file system. The exit code returned by mkfs is 0 on success and 1 on failure.
In actuality, mkfs is simply a front-end for the various file system builders (mkfs.fstype) available under Linux. The file system-specific builder is searched for in a number of directories like perhaps /sbin, /sbin/fs, /sbin/fs.d, /etc/fs, /etc (the precise list is defined at compile time but at least contains /sbin and /sbin/fs), and finally in the directories listed in the PATH enviroment variable. Please see the file system-specific builder manual pages for further details.
Please note the underlined information above.

:hattip:


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