Howto format DOS-partition?

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sunflower · Post by **sunflower** » Fri Dec 30, 2005 12:10 pm

Hello,

two question:

1. I want to have a partition on my hdd that can be read by windows xp and linux. so reiserfs is not my freind. But if I look at the types from fdisk there are lots of partition types that are connected to msdos. Which partition type is the one I should take?

2. After using fdisk to set the partition type I need to format the partition. Is there any tool under gentoo that can do this? What do i have to emerge to do so?

Thanks a lot!

intmain · Post by **intmain** » Fri Dec 30, 2005 12:37 pm

As partition type you should use one of these:
b W95 FAT32
c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
I think my last fat32 partition had c W95 FAT32 (LBA) as type.

Then you can format the partition with mkfs.vfat /dev/hddX, which is part of sys-fs/dosfstools.

sunflower · Post by **sunflower** » Fri Dec 30, 2005 12:40 pm

Thanks.

But whats exactly the difference between both types?

intmain · Post by **intmain** » Fri Dec 30, 2005 4:38 pm

I also don't know the exact difference (I only know that LBA is an addressing scheme), but I looked up the partition table of my notebook, there I have an FAT partition which is of type b W95 FAT 32.

GoofballJM1 · Post by **GoofballJM1** » Fri Dec 30, 2005 7:00 pm

sunflower wrote:Thanks.

But whats exactly the difference between both types?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT_file_system