On Monday, Apr 25, 2005, at 18:46 US/Central, L. V. Lammert wrote:
Looks like it's uba in Knoppix 3.8, . . I did a partition with fdisk, but now it will not mount. Seems like it has a problem with the drivers.
Oh well, .. what *should* be the proper way to initialize the disk as FAT32?
Right. With Knoppix 3.8, USB devices show up under /dev/ub?, e.g. /dev/uba. Here's an example of an fdisk on my USB device:
# fdisk -l /dev/uba
Disk /dev/uba: 64 MB, 64487424 bytes 4 heads, 32 sectors/track, 984 cylinders Units = cylinders of 128 * 512 = 65536 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/uba1 * 1 983 62896 6 FAT16
Just to see if I can simulate the situation you are in, I wiped the USB device (after creating a backup image, of course) and then tried to create the same setup using 'fdisk /dev/uba' and 'mkfs.vfat /dev/uba1' without any luck. I kept getting "can't determine disk geometry" errors. So I did the next best thing, create an image and then write the image to the device:
# fdisk /dev/uba1 # deleted first partiton
# fdisk /dev/uba1 # created new partition, small enough for quick testing
# fdisk -l /dev/uba # notice that the C/H/S changed from before
Disk /dev/uba: 64 MB, 64487424 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/uba1 * 1 1 8001 6 FAT16
# mkfs.vfat -C uba1.img 8001 # the number of blocks needs to be specified
# dd if=uba1.img of=/dev/uba1
# mount /mnt/uba1
# df -HlT /mnt/uba1/
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/uba1 vfat 8.2M 0 8.2M 0% /mnt/uba1
When I put the USB stick in my Mac, OS/X can read/write to it just fine. Whether Windows will be able to read it is another question. ;)
BTW, I was able to recreate the original C/H/S geometry if I specified it on the command line. Notice that I was able to get one more usable block out of the stick:
# fdisk -C 984 -H 4 -S 32 /dev/uba # removed old partition and created new partition
# fdisk -l /dev/uba
Disk /dev/uba: 64 MB, 64487424 bytes 4 heads, 32 sectors/track, 984 cylinders Units = cylinders of 128 * 512 = 65536 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/uba1 * 1 984 62960 6 FAT16
To format it, though, I still needed to create a image and dd the image to the device. IHMO, mkfs.vfat is busted for USB sticks.
Regards, - Robert http://www.cwelug.org/downloads Help others get OpenSource software. Distribute FLOSS for Windows, Linux, *BSD, and MacOS X with BitTorrent
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