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Old 07-13-2006, 02:39 PM   #1
lurko
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can't mount fat32 or fat16 as vfat


I have a sandisk USB flash drive/mp3 player. It has a fat32 filesystem on it. I can mount it just fine, if I use -t msdos, but this is no good as linux only sees the 8.3 format filenames. And if I copy anything onto it from linux, all the names get truncated and the extension gets eradicated in the process.

now the numerous threads I've read all say to mount it as "-t vfat" but that just spits out "mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,"

I just checked my kernel config to make sure that I had vfat support in there, and I do. I need some help here - I want to be able to read (in linux) the long-format names of files that might have been copied from a windows box, and be able to copy files from a linux box without wiping out long names(and ".mp3"!) in the process.

here's the relevant fstab line:
Code:
/dev/sda1        /mnt/flash       vfat        noauto,user,umask=000     0   0
trying to mount as a user with "mount /mnt/flash" spits out the wrong fs type error with that fstab, but it mounts fine when I change vfat to msdos.

"mount -t msdos /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash" will mount it ok (but with 8.3)
"mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash" will just spit out the fs error
 
Old 07-13-2006, 02:45 PM   #2
nykey
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Do you have both MSDOS fs support and VFAT (Windows-95) fs support enabled in the kernel ? Maybe you should try including them in, not as modules.
 
Old 07-13-2006, 03:10 PM   #3
lurko
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well it seems M$ fs support is all modules! fat, vfat, and ntfs. I'll put them right in now and see how it goes. my third linux question, my first linux answer. thank you nykey!
 
Old 07-13-2006, 04:20 PM   #4
lurko
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I took my last config and compiled a new kernel, changing the following items under File Systems --> DOS/FAT/NT Filesystems from being modules to actually being in the kernel (bullets to checkmarks in xconfig):
-MSDOS fs support
-VFAT (Windows-95) fs support
-NTFS file system support

those are the only (unhidden) items in this section, excluding the ntfs sub-items. There are two items underneath VFAT that I can't change
-(437) Default codepage for FAT
-Default iocharset for FAT: iso8859-1


long story short, same wrong fs error when I try to mount as vfat. I'm sure I was booting the new kernel because X wouldn't work (would have had to reinstall the nvidia module). Are there more boxes I should be ticking somewhere outside the File Systems section?

are there any packages in the slackware install that I might need?? On my current install I tried to not install the packages that looked useless to me.. I remember I got rid of the tools for JFS and HFS and some other stuff I didn't think I needed, but I don't think I would have failed to install packages related to reading M$ filesystems since I've got many gigs of those still.

but then I don't have a mkfs.vfat in /sbin, does that scream of something missing to someone???

am I right to assume that I should be able to mount, in linux as vfat, devices formatted in windows as fat16/fat32?

Last edited by lurko; 07-13-2006 at 04:23 PM.
 
Old 07-19-2006, 05:42 AM   #5
lurko
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under File Systems --> Native Language Support, the NLS_ISO8859-1 module was not compiled in my kernel. Once I added that I was able to mount as vfat with no issues.
 
Old 07-19-2006, 06:16 AM   #6
nykey
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oops, didn't think of that, ofcourse the charset is needed, good thinking. glad to know you've got it working. enjoy.
 
Old 07-19-2006, 07:00 PM   #7
lurko
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I'm pretty sure I removed it on my very first kernel compile. I mistakenly failed to realize that it was the defualt for US-english in my attempts to remove everything that wasn't.

actually the "good thinking" involved little more than running dmesg | tail, googling the results and going from there. I won't deny that I'm quite pleased I got this working though, despite the fact that the only reason it didn't work in the first place was down to me. thanks for the replies nykey, yours are the only ones I've been able to get for any questions I've had so far, I don't even get RTFM! replies.
 
  


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