fdisk and fat32

lucaz · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2003 9:22 pm Post subject: fdisk and fat32

I've run into a problem fdisking part of my 80G drive to fat 32 so both windows and gentoo can read and write to the drive. My original plans were to partition the drive as follows
1. linux swap (Swap,512M)
2. linux (ReiserFS,15G)
3. Windows (NTFS,15G)
4. extended partition containing
- 5. /boot (ext2,64MB)
- 6. shared drive (fat32(LBA), remainder of the drive)

I got it paritioned up nicely using the livecd, then proceeded to install windows in its partition. after that was done I noticed that windows treated the drive as though it was unformatted. i then booted off the livecd and tried to mount the fat32 partition but it wont mount (generic error, i think)

I thought maybe it didnt like being in the extended partition, so i tried making the drive into a single 80GB fat partiton but that wouldnt mount either.

can anyone see something I've overlooked? Im able to get windows to format fat32 partitions, but it has that stupid self-enforced 32G limit. I'd really like to get fdisk to make it one large partition

bmichaelsen · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2003 9:39 pm Post subject:

OneOfMany · Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2003 6:11 pm Post subject:

Another option is to format from a boot floppy (ME and Win2K don't have that FAT32 limitation).

And you do know there are 2 (possibly more) versions of FAT32? There's FAT32b that was introduced back in the Win95 OSR2 days (just before Win98). I can't remember the exact differences between the first and second versions (I think one was to do with enlarging partition limits), but you might look through fdisk's list of supported types and try to find something that looks like a 'b' version.

lucaz · Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2003 10:42 pm Post subject:

ahh.... yes, how silly of me. I mistakenly thought that setting the type in fdisk must also format the partition. mkfs.fat32 did the trick, thanks