On Fri, 2008-10-31 at 11:52 -0600, Phil Meyer wrote:
Christopher A. Williams wrote:
> ...
>
> Now, one last question: what's the flag to format a FAT32 partition with
> mkfs? I saw options for pretty much everything but that. I'm probably
> just suffering from not having had my first cup of coffee... :)
>
I deal with this often, as its part of my job to produce bootable pen
drives and CF cards. I like using pungi and revisor to roll a product
specific distro, and using livecd tools for copying them to the pen drives.
Most of this is scripted for convenience, but all new drives go through
a process like this:
Stomp on the MBR:
cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin >/dev/${disc}
That particular file is a generic GPL MBR. Its part of the syslinux rpm.
Run fdisk to delete all partitions and recreate just what is necessary
-- the script for that is kinda hard to read unless you are intimate
with fdisk, so I won't post it here to prevent confusion.
Be sure to tag the primary (assuming 1 here) partition as bootable.
Then to format:
mkfs -t vfat -F 32 -n "$name" /dev/${disc}1
Some vendors like to really mess with their thumb drives, requiring a
bad sector check during format. Add a -c to the above for that. It
takes a bit longer, but might help on a stubborn drive.
Exactly what I was looking for - thanks a bunch!
Cheers,
Chris
--
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"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice there is."
--Yogi Berra