Reformat an NTFS disk to FAT32?

[Alex Hewitt]

On Sun, 2008-04-20 at 16:40 -0400, Ben Scott wrote:
> 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.

Believe it or not, if you want a > 32 GB partition you need to do it
with Linux or a manufacturer supplied utility (Western Digital provides
one for some of their 2.5 external hard drives). Microsoft doesn't
believe you should be using > 32 GB FAT32 partitions even though the
file system will support operations much greater.

-Alex

> 
> >  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
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