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Create HFS+ and FAT32 partitions on one external drive - use diskutil
Authored by: hellomilano on Sep 28, '05 02:20:30PM

Bravo!...worked seamlessly on OSX 10.4 and Windows XP and I have never touched UNIX before. Only addition to above line of code was 'MBRFormat' as noted in original posting. Both booted up without effort on Mac & Win.
Grazie!



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Create HFS+ and FAT32 partitions on one external drive - use diskutil
Authored by: osxpounder on Sep 29, '05 12:42:46PM

Not working for me. I followed silentaccord's instructions, and everything stops at step 5: "5) Now use fdisk to create the master boot record (MBR) so Windows will recognize the FAT32 partition:
fdisk -e /dev/disk4" [disk4 is the disk I'm working with]

On my machine, fdisk tells me "/dev/disk4 is not a character device or a regular file" and pdisk tells me "can't open file 'disk4' (No such file or directory)". I have fdisk(8), and I'm running OSX 10.3.9.

Can't understand why Disk Utility can tell me that, yes, disk4 is mounted, but it can mount/unmount it, but fdisk swears there's no such disk4. I can use diskutil to mountDisk, too. What do think's wrong? Did I miss something?

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osxpounder



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Create HFS+ and FAT32 partitions on one external drive - use diskutil
Authored by: osxpounder on Sep 29, '05 02:13:54PM

I worked past my fdisk error: turns out I must specify the disk name differently. Although 'disk4' is what Disk Utility identifies as this disk, I had to use 'fdisk -e /dev/rdisk4' ....

So I managed to use fdisk to make the partitions, one HFS+ and one FAT32, then attached the external drive to a WinXp box. It recognized an unformatted volume, and let me format it [in this case, to 64GB].

Now, on the Mac, the FAT32 volume won't mount. Disk Utility calls it 'disk5s5', even in the graphic interface's left pane. I tried ejecting the disk and remounting. Nope. Tried just ejecting the Mac volume, which mounts every time I attach the disk, but 'disk5s5' still won't mount. Tried ejecting just the Mac volume. Tried using the buttons in DU to mount the disk5s5 volume. Nope and nope.

So I tried using the CLI and diskutil. diskutil reports that disk5s5 is mounted, but ... it doesn't show up in Finder.

If I click "Verify Disk" in DU's GUI with disk5s5 selected [greyed, not mounted, even though diskutil says it's mounted], I get:
Verifying volume "disk5s5"
BAD SUPER BLOCK: MAGIC NUMBER WRONG
** /dev/rdisk5s5 (NO WRITE)

LOOK FOR ALTERNATE SUPERBLOCKS? no


1 volume checked
1 non HFS volume checked

Now I'm really stuck, but I'm going to keep plugging at this.



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osxpounder



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