mkfs help
 

Hello
Im having a problem formating my secondary 40 gig hard drive to use the fat32 filesystem.

It was EXT3 until I needed to use it for a backup hard drive for linux and windows, so I decided to convert it over.

After I backed up about 20 gigs onto cdr's I was ready to begin.

I figured it would be easy; Windows 98 had no problem formatting it to fat32 before, but this time I was using Windows 2000 - no big problem, it has a command prompt.

After waiting for it to format it decided to tell me the hard drive is to big and I should use NTFS, which is crap because linux can't write to NTFS well and windows 98 had no problem with 'the hard drive being to big' for fat32.

I was stumped, I decided to do the only thing I knew how to do - reboot into slackware and let it do the work.

I typed mkfs then hit [tab] to see the choices. Nope, no fat32. msdos,ext, bfs, no fat32.

Maybe it will work manually I thought
cfdisk /dev/hdb
Turned it into a fat32 partition.
then mkefs -t fat32 /dev/hdb1
mke2fs 1.22, 22-Jun-2001 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
mke2fs: bad blocks count - /dev/hdb1

Oh, burn.
After I went in a fit of rage and accidently rm -rf'ed /mnt/win2000
I decided to come here and ask: What should I do? Can it be this hard?
I searched sourceforge and freshmeat and found no program to format a disk to fat32.

Note: I have no floppy drive. a bootdisk is out of the question.

;)

From my search on google for format fat32 I found this:
http://www.pjrc.com/tech/mp3/docs/hd_setup_linux.html

Basically it looks like you'll need:
mkdosfs
Which if you don't have can be downloaded in RPM format here:
http://www.rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/co....4-4.i386.html

Then I'd use rpm2tgz to convert it to a tarball, and then install it.

HTH

Cool

Excellent!
Thank you very much.
I noticed I had mkdosfs, and tried it, but it didn't work
However
I wasen't using -F 32 flag mentioned in the howto you showed me, but when I did it worked flawlessly.

thanks agian for your help

Sweet! You're welcome :)