How do I convert FAT32 to ext3 ?
Jonathan Berry
berryja at gmail.com
Fri Nov 19 18:41:12 UTC 2004
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 11:05:23 -0600, Aleksandar Milivojevic
<amilivojevic at pbl.ca> wrote:
> Terry Linhardt wrote:
> > If I understand, I can do an fdisk, re-write the partition as a Linux
> > partition, and then do an an mkfs -j .
>
> Yes. That is exactly what you need to do. I don't know how USB storage
> devices are organized (if they have partitions at all, if they are
> optional or mandatory). It might be that you don't need partitions
> defined on the USB device at all, in which case you could just create
> file system on it, as you would do if it was floppy.
>
> If there's partition table on the USB device, than you can simply change
> partition's system ID from FAT32 to Linux (83) using fdisk. If fdisk
> prints bunch of errors, when you start it, than there wasn't a partition
> table on the device (just like on good old floppies). In that case,
> forget about fdisk part, just use mkfs to build file system.
>
To me it sounded like this is a USB hard drive, but that has not been
made clear. If it is a USB *storage device* (aka, flash disk) then I
would be careful about messing with the partitions on it. I know one
that I have is setup strangely, but it may need to be that way in
order to function. It has support for passwords and other stuff
(which I'm not using) and fdisk-ing it *might* mess something up.
If this is a USB *hard disk* you should be able to partition and
format it like any other hard disk. I guess I could be wrong here (I
don't have a USB hard disk), but it makes sense to me that it should
be the same. At in this case, yes, Terry is correct: fdisk to change
partition type (or repartition as desired), and make the file system
(I've always used "mke2fs -j" but it sounds like "mkfs -j" is the same
thing).
Jonathan
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