On Sun, 2008-04-20 at 16:40 -0400, Ben Scott wrote: > On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Bruce Labitt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Now that I think about this, all that I want is a format that I can read > > and write to for the WinXP machines that I have to live with and with > > linux. > > Ah, then yah, FAT32 is likely your best bet. That seems to have > become the "lingua franca" for filesystem interoperability. > > > Unfortunately when I received the disk it already was preformatted > > NTFS. > > I'd say your best bet is to change the partition type of the > existing partition to 0x0C using fdisk, and then format it using > mkdosfs.
Believe it or not, if you want a > 32 GB partition you need to do it with Linux or a manufacturer supplied utility (Western Digital provides one for some of their 2.5 external hard drives). Microsoft doesn't believe you should be using > 32 GB FAT32 partitions even though the file system will support operations much greater. -Alex > > > I don't want a multiple partitions, just a single FAT32... So from your > > description above I'd change the partition to "c" FAT32 LBA. And then > > mkdosfs -F 32 ... > > I believe that's right. I haven't used mkdosfs in a while, but the > man page agrees with you. :) > > > So what are options 1b and 1c ??? > > The "hidden" partition types were introduced by something to "hide" > partitions from the OS. I forget what the something was -- it might > have been the "Boot Manager" that came with OS/2. Some sther software > tools followed suit (Partition Magic being one of them). Hiding > partitions was needed because some versions of some Microsoft and/or > IBM OSes had a terminal brain cramp if they saw more than one primary > partition in a format they recognized. I forget which. Prolly > Windows 95 or OS/2 2.0 or something like that. It hasn't been a > problem in a while. > > -- Ben > _______________________________________________ > gnhlug-discuss mailing list > gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org > http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/