Reformat an NTFS disk to FAT32?

[Tom Buskey]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Bruce Labitt <bruce.labitt at verizon.net>
wrote:

> Ben Scott wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 11:11 AM, Bruce Labitt <bruce.labitt at verizon.net>
> wrote:
> >
> >> I've looked around for this and I see a way or two to do this.
> >>
> >
> >   As usual, I'm going to ask: Why are you doing this?  What are you
> > trying to accomplish?  :-)
> >
> >
> 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.  The disk does not need to be bootable from XP.  Unfortunately
> when I received the disk it already was preformatted NTFS.  I don't have
> any ntfs tools on my old distro.  (I want the disk so I can store  stuff
> so I can migrate to a home copy of Scientific Linux.)  I just want to
> have FAT32 on it so I can somewhat indiscriminately use the disk for
> both linux and windoze.
>

Sounds like FAT32 will do the trick if you don't care about the 4GB file
size limit.  You can use split on linux to split the file up.  Then cat
file1 file2 > file or copy  file1+file2 file /b in DOS/Win to put them back
together.  If you have Cygwin on windows, there's a split & cat.

On the other hand, there is an ext2 filesystem for windows.  But you'd have
to install it on windows.  Better to use FAT IMHO.  Unless it doesn't do
what you want of course.

Finally, if you just want to transfer large files and don't care about
randon access, you can use tar.

tar cf /dev/usbdrive . # wipes the partitions on the drive
Then on windows you ...  hmm.  Well, you need to tar xvf the device.  I've
done it in DOS, Macintosh, OS/2 and Unixen in the past, but it depends on
the tar and how it gets to the raw devices, etc.
Anyways, your tar file can be as big as the device.  No file size limits.
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