Hi,

I was used to mount FAT32 partitions in the past, but on my new box with a new installed OpenSuse 11.2 I wasn't able to mount an old IDE drive with FAT32 format. The disc was formated under windows using FAT32 format for easy data exchange. Now I try to mount the drive but it failed with the following message: mount: unknown filesystem type 'vfat'

I startes make oldconfig and checked the created kernel options:
# grep FAT .config
# DOS/FAT/NT Filesystems
CONFIG_FAT_FS=y
CONFIG_VFAT_FS=y
CONFIG_FAT_DEFAULT_CODEPAGE=437
CONFIG_FAT_DEFAULT_IOCHARSET="iso8859-1"

It seems, that the kernel should be able to handle it(?).

I tried to mount the file system:
# mount -t vfat /dev/sdh1 /austausch
mount: unknown filesystem type 'vfat'

I /sbin I didn't find a file like mount.vfat or so:
# ls /sbin/mount*
/sbin/mount.cifs /sbin/mount.nfs /sbin/mount.ntfs
/sbin/mount.fuse /sbin/mount.nfs4 /sbin/mount.ntfs-3g

Only ntfs is available.

What can I do? What is missing? I tried to search a package providing something like mount.vfat or mount.msdos but all failed.

I find mkfs programs creating vfat or msdos filesystems:
# ls /sbin/mkfs*
/sbin/mkfs /sbin/mkfs.ext2 /sbin/mkfs.minix /sbin/mkfs.reiserfs
/sbin/mkfs.bfs /sbin/mkfs.ext3 /sbin/mkfs.msdos /sbin/mkfs.vfat
/sbin/mkfs.cramfs /sbin/mkfs.ext4 /sbin/mkfs.ntfs


But how cat I access it?

Hi,

I solved it myself.

Afetr an internet search I found out that there might be a reboot fix the problem. I checked the kernel version which is installed an found out that the installed version is newer than the running/used version which is displayed by uname -a.

So I run reboot on in a root terminal and after that the mount worked without error message.

I suspect a kernel update for security reason...