fat32 CF card

[kilaueabart]

When I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for the first time just over a year ago, I seem to have committed one of my many goofs. Today I was rereading the installation instructions that I had stored in an Amiga drawer and I noticed the part about making sure the CF card was formatted as fat16, and I didn't remember seeing that part before.

So I booted up Ubuntu and took a look with GParted. Sure enough, fat32!
(And 3.72 GiB of it.)

I'm not sure what kind of problems that error has caused, but I plan to fix it. I see three possible approaches.

1. The easiest would be to temporarily copy the kernel files on the card to a new folder on my linux hard drive, properly reformat the CF card, and copy the files back. But I suspect this might be impossible, because the partition would be in use and undeletable. I considered trying it to see, but I'm scared even the attempt to do so could mess things up badly.

2. Copy the kernel files to a thumb drive, boot from that, and then I could presumably replace the unused fat32 partition and copy those kernels to a nice 4 MiB fat16 one.

3. Or probably I could fix the card from the Amiga side and once more uncompress the compressed kernel files that I saved in an Archives drawer and copy them in again.

Does any one of these sound better than the others?

[xeno74]

Hi Kilaueabart,

Copy all files and folders from the CF card to the hard disk or to a USB stick. After that delete the FAT32 partition with Gparted and create a 2GB FAT16 partition on the CF card. After that you can mount the CF card and copy all files back. That's all.

Rgds,

Christian

[kilaueabart]

Thanks. I shouldn't always come crying here before thinking everything through. What I ended up doing was booting the ubuntu disk, making a new drawer in NTSF, coping the kernels into it, then followed the installation instructions (opened on-screen) step by step.

That resulted in a 4GB partition instead of 2GB; I hope I won't be sorry later.

Then I stupidly forgot to close linux properly and ended up having to reboot twice, but here I am.

I'm still wondering what the problem was with FAT32. I don't see any difference.

[mechanic]

There is not really any problem with FAT32, however FAT16 has been around so long that it is fully supported on just about everything, FAT32 .... not quite there yet.

You might think of FAT16 as kind of a universal file system. Do a google for FAT16. I'm sure you will find a wiki with what I mean.

[xeno74]

I use a FAT16 formatted SanDisk CF card with 256MB without any problems many years. I write or delete a lot on this CF card because of the kernel development. I think FAT16 is the solution.