Problem mounting FAT32 hard drive

[Chris Kloiber]

On Tue, 2003-12-02 at 03:38, listas at lozano.eti.br wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> I use vfat on RHL8/9 and FC1 to mount partitions with more than 2Gb (tried 6, 8
> and 22Gb) from Win95, 98 and ME. No problems readgin and writing, but neither
> can create then (have to create/format using windoze). Scandisk has no complains.
> 
> 
> []s, Fernando Lozano
> 
> 
> > Clifford Snow wrote:
> > 
> > >On Fri, 2002-11-29 at 14:03, AL wrote:
> > >
> > >>Any thoughts on this? I have a second hard drive located at HDD and it is a 
> > >>single partition 80GB drive. When I try to mount it as root I get the error 
> > >>"mount: fs type fat not supported by kernel." I currently have fat support 
> > >>loaded as a module. It shows up when I do lsmod, but its not in the kernel. 
> > >>At least it doesn't show up when I do a "cat /proc/filesystems."
> > >>
> > >
> > >Sorry I don't have an answer for you, but check your clock.  Your
> > >message is showing up with the wrong year (2002)
> > >
> > >Clifford
> > >
> > Its "vfat" rather than "fat" (to support more than 8.3 filenames) and 
> > its normally limited to 2GB. The win95 vfat32 I've not tried mounting (I 
> > don't have any partitions of that type) so that I have no experience of 
> > so cannot say if it works or not.
> > 
> > HTH
> > Chris

Assuming you want to nuke /dev/hdb1 and use FAT32 (vfat):

# mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/hdb1

One thing I will note about this. Real Windows doesn't always like
partitions made this way (at least for booting). I think it has to do
with cylinder boundaries. Keeping a win98 emergency boot disk around for
this purpose is a good idea. 

-- 
Chris Kloiber
Red Hat, Inc.