[vox-tech] Reformatting a FAT32 partition

[Troy Arnold]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 01:35:53PM -0800, Richard S. Crawford wrote:
> While rebuilding my system, I created a partition that I meant to share 
> between Windows and Linux for the occasional document that *has* to be 
> in MS Word, or the occasional graphic that I just can't figure out how 
> to fix in GIMP.  Originally, I accidentally formatted the partition as 
> FAT32, and got a message from my kernel as I was booting up that said, 
> "Warning -- FAT32 support is still alpha."  Which I knew, of course.
> 
> So now, I'm back in Windows, trying to reformat that partition as FAT 
> instead of FAT32.  Windows says it can't complete the format for some 
> reason.

Well, Mr. Crawford ;-)

If booting to windows is something you really don't need to do very
often, you might look into explore2fs which will allow you to safely
read, and not so safely write ext2 partitions from win32.

http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

On the other hand, I haven't had any problems reading and writing
vfat(FAT32) partitions from Linux using kernel 2.4.  In fact, it hasn't
been marked as "experimental" for quite some time. If you want to go
that route, just make sure to format the partition in windoze.

Definitely use fat32/vfat instead of fat.  Otherwise you'll be back to
8.3 file names.

-ta