fcisler
Premium
join:2004-06-14
Riverhead, NY
| FreeBSD format USB disk
Long story short....
I have a 120+/-GB (i'm not really positive) disk in a USB enclosure, which i need to format.
For it's uses, it needs to be FAT32. The device(s) that it will be used with are capable for recognizing large FAT32 partitions.
As we know, for whatever reason, microsoft will NOT allow me to format any disk greater than 32GB in FAT32.
So i plug it into my freebsd machine, dd, newfs_msdos, and then mount it.
It recognizes it fine, and i start copying files to it.
I then plug it into two different windows machines - no dice. Both do not recognize it.
I then figure maybe i'll setup the partitions in windows, and format it back in FreeBSD. I delete the partition, tell it to make a new one, and not to format. I wait till it's done, and tell windows to eject it.
Now this morning, i plugged it back in - and lo-and-behlod - my OLD partition (that was made via above steps) shows up as da1s1!
I can mount it and view all my previous files!
Connecting to a windows machine will STILL show no partition.
Here's the fdisk:
# fdisk /dev/da1
******* Working on device /dev/da1 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=14593 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)
Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=14593 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)
Media sector size is 512
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 6 (0x06),(Primary 'big' DOS (>= 32MB))
start 63, size 234436482 (114470 Meg), flag 0
beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
end: cyl 1023/ head 254/ sector 63
The data for partition 2 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
<UNUSED>
and a df -h shows:
/dev/da1 112G 687M 111G 1% /mnt/usb
And here's a dmesg:
umass0: Prolific Tech. Inc. ATAPI-6 Bridge Controller, rev 2.00/0.01, addr 2
da1 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da1: <WDC WD12 00JB-00EVA0 15.0> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-0 device
da1: 40.000MB/s transfers
da1: 114473MB (234441648 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 14593C)
So my basic question boils down to this:
HOW can I use FreeBSD (or linux, i have a kurobox here i can use) to make a FAT32 partition that uses the WHOLE DISK - but is still recognized in windows? If i can't get this working FAT32 - then i'm forced to use NTFS. I normally don't mind NTFS - but it's going to be used with a Numark D2 Director, and with NTFS it's read only...so I lose certain features.
Thanks! |
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deblin
Dark Side of the Moon
Premium,MVM
join:2001-09-01
Middletown, DE
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| The handbook mentions this in section 18.3.2:
said by handbook :
If you will not be sharing the new drive with another operating system, you may use the dedicated mode. Remember this mode can confuse Microsoft operating systems; however, no damage will be done by them. IBM's OS/2 however, will “appropriate” any partition it finds which it does not understand. "dedicated" slices show up as /dev/(da|ad)[0-9] (e.g. in your case, /dev/da1). Those will not work with MS OSes...so you want to use slices. Check out section 18.3.2.1 of the handbook here, there is a section on how to create slices so that MS OSes will play nice with them.
--
"Hey honey! Do you think KFC's still open?" |
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donoreo
Premium
join:2002-05-30
North York, ON | reply to fcisler
If you cannot get it to work, have access to a Mac? I have used a Mac to format a large disk in FAT32.
--
I cannot deny anything I did not say |
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fcisler
Premium
join:2004-06-14
Riverhead, NY | reply to deblin
AH! Thanks...i had followed the BOTTOM step of the "dedicated" section - found on another site.
I'm going to try the first method, otherwise i'll format it on the Mac (thanks donoreo!). |
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fcisler
Premium
join:2004-06-14
Riverhead, NY
| reply to fcisler
Ok here's what i've got:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 bs=1k count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1024 bytes transferred in 0.000710 secs (1442232 bytes/sec)
# fdisk -BI da1
******* Working on device /dev/da1 *******
fdisk: invalid fdisk partition table found
fdisk: Geom not found
# bsdlabel -e da1s1
# newfs_msdos /dev/da1s1a
/dev/da1s1a: 233979456 sectors in 29247432 FAT32 clusters (4096 bytes/cluster)
bps=512 spc=8 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf8 spt=63 hds=255 hid=4294967280 bsec=234436482 bspf=228496 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=2
#mount -t msdos /dev/da1s1a /mnt/usb
#df -h | grep da1s1a
/dev/da1s1a 112G 12K 112G 0% /mnt/usb
Does this look to be correct? The disk schema naming reminds me of OpenBSD....am i correct in that the "c" slice is the "whole disk" partition (i know i'm refering to it incorrect)?
And now, since i'm never satisfied that "it just worked" - the dd tells it to zero out the partition table, and make one new partition (count=1?), ....(fdisk -BI?), the bsdlabel labels the disk (huh?), and the my newfs_msdos tells it to format in fat32?
Am I close? I see the comments on that link...but i'm not sure what each step does. |
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deblin
Dark Side of the Moon
Premium,MVM
join:2001-09-01
Middletown, DE | It looks like you're good to go. If you can mount /dev/da1s1a and df shows all the space as it should, then it should be fine. Does Windows see it now?
--
"Hey honey! Do you think KFC's still open?" |
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fcisler
Premium
join:2004-06-14
Riverhead, NY
| reply to fcisler
No....i'm so confused....
Windows recognized it...but not a partition.....
Booted to OS X, formatted as "MSDOS", booted to windows - and it was there.
Later tonight when I go back home i'm going to compare fdisk's and see what I missed. |
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