From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Aug 6 18:42:22 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA06766 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 6 Aug 1997 18:42:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: from andrsn.stanford.edu (root@andrsn.Stanford.EDU [36.33.0.163]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA06758 for ; Wed, 6 Aug 1997 18:42:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (andrsn@localhost.stanford.edu [127.0.0.1]) by andrsn.stanford.edu (8.8.6/8.6.12) with SMTP id SAA16441; Wed, 6 Aug 1997 18:42:18 -0700 (PDT) Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 18:42:17 -0700 (PDT) From: Annelise Anderson To: "Daniel \"the Bruce\" Keller" cc: FreeBSD Questions List Subject: Re: FIPS, FAT32 and FreeBSD In-Reply-To: <199708062150.OAA27161@psln1.psln.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Wed, 6 Aug 1997, Daniel "the Bruce" Keller wrote: > Hi, > does anybody know if FIPS works with FAT32 file systems? I have a friend who > would like to use FreeBSD, but his computer uses FAT32 and he gets the > message "Error: Unknown Filesystem: OBh". I remember reading somewhere that > FreeBSD won't work at all on a Harddrive that has FAT32 partitions. Is there > any way to convert a FAT32 file system to a normal FAT file system? If not, > and the only option is it reformat and partition, will the standard format > program still make FAT systems, not just FAT32? > thanks, > Daniel Keller > I'm not sure about FIPS, but I think Partition Magic (commercial) can handle resizing of FAT32 and conversion from FAT32 to FAT and v.v. At least the manual for version 3.0 says so (I haven't tried this feature, but the more standard features have worked well for me). I find the statement that "FreeBSD won't work at all on a Harddrive that has FAT32 partitions" rather odd. I don't think FreeBSD cares about the nature of the other partitions, provided it has a primary partition in which it can be installed. It can't, however (as far as I know) read either an OS/2 HPFS or a FAT32; thus these would be unavailable (unlike a Windows95 FAT) while FreeBSD is running. Partition Magic comes with a program that will "unintall-move" programs installed under Windows95, which can be very useful when you're changing or planning to change the size of partitions. (I'm just a satisfied customer.) Annelise