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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: lethe on Jan 10, '05 09:08:08AM

Hi, this was a very helpful hint for me. Also, notice that you can use disk utility to partition the disk, and only newfs the partition you want (you don't have to make the entire disk fat32, I like to have an HFS+ partition as well).

Also, I couldn't get the partition to mount following the instructions. Finally I tried

$ mkdir Desktop/pcdisk
$ mount_msdos /dev/disk1s7 Desktop/pcdisk/
you must be running as root to load modules into the kernel
mount_msdos: msdos filesystem is not available
$ sudo mount_msdos /dev/disk1s7 Desktop/pcdisk/
Password:
kextload: /System/Library/Extensions/msdosfs.kext loaded successfully

which worked, and explains why I couldn't get Disk Utility to mount the volume: the msdos filesystem kernel module was not loaded. This has the disadvantage that automounter is not taking care of the mounting and dismounting, when I'm done, I will want to remove the mount directory and such. I was hoping that after doing the above step I could unmount and then get disk utility to mount it properly, now that the kernel module was loaded, but no such luck.



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Format large Fat32 volumes in Panther
Authored by: lethe on Jan 17, '05 11:52:41PM

the first part of my comment above doesn't work. If you partition the drive with your mac, the PC won't be able to read it. I suspect something about incompatible partition tables. I have only been able to make the PC read the drive if I format the entire drive as 1 FAT partition.



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