Hi,

I'm working on a box with an external USB drive 300GB. I ran the following commends to create a vfat filesystem.

dd of=/dev/sdb1 if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1024
mkfs -t vfat -c /dev/sdb1

It was previously NTFS. my SSH connection was closed by a firewall time out. when I came back in ran the same commands again. I'm running top and see:

21770 root 18 0 73192 70m 428 D 5 1.7 3:22.08 mkfs.vfat

Will this process go away then it is done working on the drive?

Then I should be able to mount the drive like this??

mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/vfat

I made this a folder to mount to '/mnt/vfat'

Thanks,
Mike

wouldn't you want to use fdisk to delete the current partition and create one?

then use the mkfs.vfat

or download gparted and use the nice GUI...

Yes, after you have the partition created and have run the mkfs you will be able to mount it with the above command.

Hi,

Thanks. I only SSH access to this box. I'm guessing I did not do this correctly. I'll stop the current the process and and start this from beginning.

Thanks,

Mike

There's nothing wrong in what you are doing, assuming that sdb1 exists and the partition table is sane. There's no need to zero it out though, unless you have a good reason to. There's no need to delete and re-create the partition either. Just reformat it with whatever fs you want.

The bad block check will be taking the time - do you really need to do that ?.

Thanks for pointing that out. Next time I'll omit the block check.

Mike

AFAIK, vfat doesn't support volumes over 140 gb I think

When I :

root@host [~]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sdb: 300.0 GB, 300069052416 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 36481 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 36482 293033984 7 HPFS/NTFS

It looks like it is using all the cylinders 1-36482. Does that mean it is using 300GB?

It's kind of odd that the system it is showing is HPFS/NTFS. When I mount:

mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/vfat

is mounts read/write.

Mike

Hi,

Even stranger.

root@host [~]# fdisk /dev/sdb1

command 'p'

does not display any partitions. Yet it does mount.

Can someone help me. What is the correct way to format this 300GB drive fat32.

I did this:

dd of=/dev/sdb1 if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1024
mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdb1

Got rig of the block check. It seems to work. I'm just thinking I want to confirm it is accurate.

Thanks,
Mike

That's a flag that DOS and some other things can use to determine the "type" of the partition, which doesn't necessarily mean that the partition is formated that way at all.

In fdisk, if my memory serves correctly, the command "l" will list the known types, and surely there's another command to change that silly byte. It really doesn't matter, smart programs can guess that without having to resort to that info, which sometimes is not even in sync with the contents of the partition, as in your case.

As per the max volume size, for fat32 I am pretty much sure that it's 2TB, and it would seem improbably to me that vfat is going to lower that limit, plus there's no reason to do so. I think I've used bigger volumes (bigger than 140gb) myself, but I can't be sure right now.

The winxp installer couldn't create volumes bigger than 128gb or so, I don't really remember. Though xp itself could use bigger volumes if you created them using another OS or tool.

- "fdisk -l" shows one partition covering the entire disk (300 Gig) - says nothing about the filesystem on that partition.
- the id of 7 (NTFS) is indicative only; for (human) sanity should agree with the filesystem type, but doesn't have to, as you've found.
- fdisk works with devices, not partitions - "fdisk /dev/sdb1" is invalid.
- after you mount it, do a "df -hT" to see how big it really is

Hi,

root@host [/mnt/vfat]# df -hT
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
ext3 1.6T 11G 1.5T 1% /
/dev/sda1 ext3 99M 18M 77M 19% /boot
tmpfs tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev/shm
/usr/tmpDSK ext3 485M 11M 449M 3% /tmp
/dev/sdb1 vfat 280G 55M 280G 1% /mnt/vfat
root@host [/mnt/vfat]#

/dev/SB1 is 280GB

I copied a 55M file to it to see if it would write.

Thanks,
Mike