Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Jul 28, '04 09:59:00AM
Contributed by: Anonymous
For external drives you want to share between Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, they must be in FAT32 format. Windows XP will create a FAT32 partition no greater than 32GB. Linux will create very large FAT32 partitions (if you have Linux at your disposal). Today I've found a way to do the same on Mac OS X.
- Open Disk Utility. Find the disk in the list that you want to format, control-click and select "Information". You're looking for the "Disk Identifier," which should be something like disk1, disk2, disk3 etc.
- Create the DOS partition table. Open Terminal and type fdisk -e /dev/rdisk#, where # is the disk number you got from step one. Now type auto dos to create one big FAT32 partition. Finally, type write and then quit to save the new partition table.
- Format the FAT32 partition. Type newfs_msdos -F 32 -v "MyVolumeName" /dev/rdisk#s1, where # is the disk number you got in step one. This will format the drive as FAT32.
- Check if the volume is mounted. If it isn't, close and reopen Disk Utility, select "MyVolumeName" and choose File -> Mount."
Here's a transcript (line breaks added for narrower display) to show how I formatted an 80GB external firewire drive.
[~] % man fdisk
[~] % fdisk -e /dev/rdisk4
fdisk: could not open MBR file /usr/standalone/i386/boot0:
No such file or directory
Enter 'help' for information
fdisk: 1> auto dos
fdisk:*1> write
Writing MBR at offset 0.
fdisk: 1> quit
[~] % newfs_msdos -F 32 -v "MUSIC1" /dev/rdisk4s1
/dev/rdisk4s1: 156263232 sectors in 2441613 FAT32 clusters
(32768 bytes/cluster)
bps=512 spc=64 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf0 spt=32 hds=255 hid=0
bsec=156301425 bspf=19076 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=6
[robg adds: I haven't tested this one...]
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