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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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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