Reformat an NTFS disk to FAT32?

[Ben Scott]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Bruce Labitt <bruce.labitt at verizon.net> wrote:
>  Now that I think about this, all that I want is a format that I can read
>  and write to for the WinXP machines that I have to live with and with
>  linux.

  Ah, then yah, FAT32 is likely your best bet.  That seems to have
become the "lingua franca" for filesystem interoperability.

> Unfortunately when I received the disk it already was preformatted
> NTFS.

  I'd say your best bet is to change the partition type of the
existing partition to 0x0C using fdisk, and then format it using
mkdosfs.

>  I don't want a multiple partitions, just a single FAT32...  So from your
>  description above I'd change the partition to "c" FAT32 LBA.  And then
>  mkdosfs -F 32 ...

  I believe that's right.  I haven't used mkdosfs in a while, but the
man page agrees with you.  :)

>  So what are options 1b and 1c ???

  The "hidden" partition types were introduced by something to "hide"
partitions from the OS.  I forget what the something was -- it might
have been the "Boot Manager" that came with OS/2.  Some sther software
tools followed suit (Partition Magic being one of them).  Hiding
partitions was needed because some versions of some Microsoft and/or
IBM OSes had a terminal brain cramp if they saw more than one primary
partition in a format they recognized.  I forget which.  Prolly
Windows 95 or OS/2 2.0 or something like that.  It hasn't been a
problem in a while.

-- Ben