How do I format a partition?
 

Here's the thing. I have a new 80GB hd on my HP laptop. I installed WinXP on a small portion of the disk (10GB). The rest is RAW, right? So I install SlackWare 10.2 on a 12GB partition and a swap of 512MB. I have around 58GB or so that are RAW.

Since I need that part in FAT32 to be accesable from both OS's I tried to format the space with XP and it only gave me the NTFS option, so I went to the command prompt and did a:

C:\>format e: /FS:FAT32

It started to format, but after it finished it said: "volume is too big for FAT32" ??

I want to know what command to use in Linux if I want to format this section in FAT32. Can anyone help please?

P.S.
I'm a newbie just in case.

Microsoft has set a size limit for a FAT32 partition that XP can create and format to 32GB.

You can use the mkfs.vfat (or mkdosfs) command to format the partition. Example:
mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/hdxy

(where hdxy is the actual device ID of the partition).

See man pages for more detals.

"I want to know what command to use in Linux if I want to format this section in FAT32."

mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/hda4

"It started to format, but after it finished it said: "volume is too big for FAT32" ??"

FAT32 can only support up to 2G. This 2G limit holds true whether you format in Windows or format in Linux. So I suggest that you create one or more logical partitions of size 2G and leave the rest of your hard drive available as RAW.

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

2GB for single file on fat32 partition but the partition itself can be up to 40GB but not more - this is FAT32 proper limitation

AFAIK a FAT32 volume size can be on the order of 2TB.

The max size of a FAT16 partition is 2GB.

I do not know if mkdosfs is limited in partition size.

theoreticaly it can be up to 2TB but for example using windoze tools will not let You format a fat32 partition larger than 32GB - although with some tricks u can use larger than 32GB partitions in windoze

if mkfs.vfat is for formatting dos partitions...

what do you use to format a swap partition, mkfs.swap ???

and if it's not mkfs.vfat then what is it???

yes, i made the idiot mistake of reformatting my swap partition and now it won't mount properly. i've run e2fsck on it and it makes corrects but it still does not mount. or if it does, it reports a size of 0.

please help, i do not want to have to re-%$#-install slackware over this.

thanks

- perry

and that's why i keep coming back to LQ.org

thanks (again) for being there guys

- perry

I have backup partition of 80GB of Fat32

If you use MS Windows it has Disk management program. Create partition with it and format it within windows.

Windows is still capable of supporting a FAT32 partition greater then 32GB but it can not create one greater then 32GB.

To quote Microsoft.
http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;q314463

For all who disbelieve I posted new shot of my partitioner.
Seeing is believing - right?
http://slackerlx.blogspot.com/

"if mkfs.vfat is for formatting dos partitions...

what do you use to format a swap partition, mkfs.swap ???

and if it's not mkfs.vfat then what is it???"

swap is not a file system. You format swap with mkswap. See:

man mkswap

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

Quoting the link michaelk posted:
As you can see, you can't create it during Setup, but you can after it :)

And here, a description of FAT32 from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310525/EN-US/
And jailbait is right, swap has it's own filesystem, so you can use a partition for it, or format a file and use a swap file instead of a partition.
vfat is a FAT filesystem, not a Swap one, you could however, put a Swap formated FILE under vfat.

I recently bought a new 200GB Hard Drive. Installed it, booted windows, create a new FAT32 partition, but heee.... it didn't take the complete disk space/size (don't know exactly what it was but I remember it being bigger than than 32GB).

Ah well, I just booted my Slackware install on the same machine, created the partition, and booted Windows, and there it was, my 200 GB :)