[Glastonbury] NTFS -> FAT32

Andrew M.A. Cater amacater at galactic.demon.co.uk
Tue Nov 30 19:53:43 GMT 2004


On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 12:45:03PM +0000, tim hall wrote:
> I'm having enormous problems trying to write a FAT32 filesystem to a 20G HD 
> that used to have NTFS on it. I think I successfully wiped it using a 
> combination of fdisk/cfdisk and then just writing (dd) a whole bunch of zeros 
> into the start of the drive. However, if I now try mkfs.vfat I'm told that 
> I'm trying to create too large a file system, even if I break it down to two 
> 10G partitions. Any suggestions?
> 
> I need to dump about 14G of archive stuff on it (mostly Windows generated) and 
> be able to read it under both WinXP and Debian.
> 
> cheers
> 
Windows at one time had a 2G limit (DOS), then an 8G. Are you absolutely
sure you're not hitting something like that?  A DR DOS 7 bootdisk on floppy
and fdisk /mbr ought to do it - followed by a Linux cfdisk.

Not sure this helps :(

Andy



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