Re: how to format a thumb drive - vfat

On Thu, 17 Aug 2006 15:52:41 +0000 (UTC), Richard C Williams staggered
into the Black Sun and said:
stan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Richard C Williams <richard_c_williams@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Could someone help me with the magic incantation to format a thumb
drive as vfat so I can use it between my linux and windows boxes? I
have one that came formatted vfat and it works fine. I keep getting
a bad block count error message on the other when I try to format
it. I'm on Red Hat 9.

Redhat 9 has been EOLed for 2 years now. Time to upgrade, eh?

Since you are going back and forth to a Windows box anyhow, why not
just format it over on Windows where FAT is natively supported?
It's fat now which works on windows but my linux box won't find it.

EXPN "won't find it". You should post the exact mkdosfs command you're
using, the exact error message you get when you use it, and the output
of "fdisk -l /dev/sdN" where N is the USB drive's letter (probably a, if
you don't have any other SCSI or pseudo-SCSI devices connected.)

I've seen a number of USB keychain drives with mangled partition tables.
The cure for that is to fdisk the drive, then create 1 partition of type
0x06 (> 32M < 2G), type 0x0b (> 2G < 8G) or type 0x0c (> 8G). Then
"mkdosfs /dev/sdN1", adding -F32 if the partition you created is > 2G.

--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
http://www.brainbench.com / "He is a rhythmic movement of the
-----------------------------/ penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL
.

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