Mounting FAT fs on usb stick

K05T9 · 05-06-2007, 09:52 AM

1)i can not use any ckfs.vfat, mkfs.vfat commands

Code:

root@localhost:~# sudo /sbin/fsck.vfat /dev/sda1
sudo: /sbin/fsck.vfat: command not found

2)i can not see any files in usbstick, just exploring /mnt/usbstick folder

There u can see what 'mount' returns after mounting usbstick:

Code:

/dev/sda1 on /mnt/usbstick type ext3 (rw)

After unmounting:

Code:

root@localhost:~# sudo /sbin/fsck.ext3 /dev/sda1
e2fsck 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
/dev/sda1: clean, 10/32256 files, 8192/128876 blocks

I have formated drive several times and i have no important files in it.

K05T9 · 05-06-2007, 10:37 AM

Now, i just need to know, how can i format this usbstick like a brand new drive on vfat fs. I don't need to save any files.

jschiwal · 05-06-2007, 09:13 PM

You may have a mkfs.vfat program that you can use to create a FAT32 filesystem on the pendrive. There is also a mkfs program that is a wrapper that launches the correct program based on the filesystem entry. I believe that the mkfs.vfat program will produce either a FAT32 or FAT16 filesystem depending of the size of the pendrive. You can check which one was used with "file -s /dev/sda1" afterwards.

# mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1 -n volume_name
or
# mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1

I am entering this from memory, so please read the manpages for mkfs and mkfs.vfat for details, and in case my memory isn't correct. Also, if you use sudo, you might need to precede the command with it's directory location; probably either /sbin/, or /usr/sbin/.

There are also the programs from the mtools package that can do things like relabel msdos filesystems.