Mount fat32 partition

[James Wilkinson]

Jeff Vian wrote:
> 2.  Are you certain the partition is vfat? Filesystems of type vfat are
> NOT fat, and vice versa. In other words, a fat filesystem cannot be
> mounted with the -t vfat option.

This is not really accurate.

FAT is the old-fashioned DOS format with 8.3 filenames (e.g.
notenoug.ext). Vfat is the same thing with Microsoft's extensions to
allow it to store long Unicode filenames.

Vfat should always be mountable as FAT. Pure FAT needs upgrading to
be mountable as Vfat, but:
 * there are very few pure FAT filesystems around these days: any
   modern tool will automatically create VFAT, without asking.

 * When you put a FAT floppy in a Win95 and up machine, Windows would
   silently change it to the vfat format. It was still supposed to work
   as a FAT disk on earlier MS OSes. (The DOS world being what it was,
   this did break a number of "copy protection" routines...)

 * Anything over 4 GB *has* to be a FAT32 partition. This postdates
   Vfat, so you can rely on it having support for long filenames. But
   it still supports 8.3-only mode, for use in the DOS 7.1 that
   underlies Win98 and Win95 OSR2.

(Those extensions are thoroughly weird: check the end of
Documentation/filesystems/vfat in Linux source code for more details).

Nicholas (the original poster): can you see this disk through WinXP?
Are there any files on the disk?

It sounds as though you've defined the partition through fdisk. There
is support in the PC partition format for filesystem types: here you
can say that the partition *will* have a vfat filesystem in the future.
I'm just not convinced that you've formatted the partition (Windows
terminology) = put a filesystem on in (Unix terminology).

James.

Trivia time: which OS will create and install on 4 GB FAT16 partitions?

-- 
E-mail address: james | The grass is always greener on the other side of
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