Mount fat32 partition

[Paul Howarth]

On Mon, 2004-09-13 at 18:23, Nicolas Fortin wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I want to share a fat32 partition between Fedora and WinXP.  I created
> the 
> mounted directory (/mnt/win) and tried the following command :
> 
> mount -t vfat /dev/hda8 /mnt/win
> 
> Unfortunately, I got this message :
> 
> mount : wrong fs type, bad option bad superblock on /dev/hda8, or too
> may 
> mounted file systems.
> 
> I looked my partition details with "fdisk -l /dev/hda" but fdisk was
> not 
> installed.

fdisk is in /sbin, which won't be in your PATH if you just use "su" to
switch user to root. Try "su -" instead.

> So I tried fdisk from a bootable cd and according it, /dev/hda8 
> is really a fat partition. I also attempted to add the following line
> in my 
> /etc/fstab file :
> 
> /dev/hda8   /mnt/win   vfat   noauto,user   0 0
> 
> but I am still stuck with the same message when Fedora is lauched.
> 
> Now, I simply don't know what to do. I will be glad if anyone could
> help me.

Is the FAT partition previous formatted (in Windows?) or is it a
newly-created partition? If new, you'll need to create the FAT
filesystem on it before you can mount it:

/sbin/mkfs.vfat /dev/hda8

(this will, of course, trash any data you may have on that partition)

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>