format to fat32 (lba) with Konsole?

[Freddan]

Hi all. Want to format a 160gb partition to fat32, either through qtparted or with the help from a console.

I tried to install qtparted but it only found my "hde" drive and not my "hdb" that the partiotion is on. So I went to cfdisk but it refused to write the partition table if I didn't make one partition bootable. which I don't want to do.

Can someone pls help me to find all my drives in qtparted or guide me through cfdisk.

The drive that I want to use is "hdb" and the setup on that will be.

hdb1 160gb fat32
hdb2 8gb ext3
hdb3 25gb ext3

The other 2 partitions is done but Kubuntus install didn't make my fat32 lbs compatible so I need to fix that. Thx for any help I can get. /// Freddan

[sbrydon]

Re: format to fat32 (lba) with Konsole?

Have you tried

sudo mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/hdb1

More options can be found:

man mkfs.vfat

[Freddan]

Re: format to fat32 (lba) with Konsole?

I made a partition table that look like this:

hdb1 primary W95 FAT32 169983
hdb2 primary ext3 8003
hdb3 primary ext3 22060

with cfdisk.

When trying to format the hdb1 partition afterwards I get.

freddan@Kubuntu:~$ sudo mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/hdb1
mkfs.vfat 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)
mkfs.vfat: Too few blocks for viable file system

Pls help I really need my FAT32 partition working :-). /// Freddan

[sbrydon]

Re: format to fat32 (lba) with Konsole?

mkfs.vfat should have been able to work out the size of your /dev/hdb1 partition automatically.

You could try explicitly stating the number of blocks to format:

sudo fdisk -l /dev/hdb1

-l is a minus followed by lowercase L. This should print the partition table giving you the size of the partition in blocks.

Then:

sudo mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/hdb1 [block count from prev command]

Can you delete all of the partitions and start from scratch? Perhaps creating the FAT32 partition first and formatting it before creating the other partitions?