Windows Fat32 vs Gparted Fat32
 

Hi,

I haven't used Linux in years and I'm a more than a little rusty. I am doing a favor for a client and came across a strange issue today.

A Windows formatted Fat32 USB drive was read only in Linux. When I formatted the same USB drive, again Fat32, using Gparted it was read/write. I don't think the fstab entry is wrong, since the usb drives register as rw, but I can't confirm this as I don't have access to the device at the moment.

What is the difference between the two methods of formatting? Does Windows us a different partition ID?

My client is very uncomfortable using Gparted to format the usb drives. I would like to be able to offer a workaround for him, if possible.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Sharon

Drives VFAT-formatted in Linux or other OSes should be readable w/o problems. Drives may go read-only when there's for instance discrepancies between the state of the file system as it is now and how it should be as in the "dirty" flag previously didn't get cleared. Posting output from 'fsck.vfat -nVv /dev/driveletterpartitionnumber' on partitions VFAT-formatted in Linux or other OSes might show clues or else mounting partitions and watching dmesg or /var/log/messages may.

There is only one fat32 that I know of.

What may have happened is that the pendrive was not mounted read/write at first. Then you later after you used gparted, somehow mounted it read write permissions.

Without knowing more about how the user and version of linux was setup, we can't tell what the mount permissions were to the user.

Thanks
 

Thanks for your help.

Sharon