USB Flash disk

[Greg Hamilton]

Finally working, though I've observed some curious things along the way 
which some of you may find interesting.

I formatted it as HFS with Disk Utility in OSX 10.3 and wrote some 
files to it. I attached it to another OSX machine in the office and 
read the files.

Then I formatted it as VFAT on an x86 Debian Linux box and wrote some 
files to it and I could read them back on another Linux box.

However, when I attached the freshly reformatted VFAT dongle to an OSX 
Mac it found the old HFS partition with the files still intact. Cool 
eh?

After a bit more tinkering I've started to suspect there's a bug in the 
new Disk Utility in 10.3. I don't think it pays any attention to the 
settings you specify when it creates a file system. It goes right ahead 
and makes a journaled HFS+ file system with OS9 support enabled. Even 
if I select 'erase' and specify 'MSDOS' as the desired file system it 
seems to create HFS+.

Fortunately I was able to specify no partitions, 100% free space, after 
which I was finally able  to create a VFAT file system using YDL which 
I can read/write in both OSX and Linux, which was the whole point of 
buying the thing in the first place.

The End.


On 31/10/2003, at 3:36 PM, Greg Hamilton wrote:

> That's what I thought so I tried manually mounting it as vfat but it 
> didn't work. So I've tried reformatting it as UFS and HFS using OSX. 
> In both cases I get a filesystem I can read/write in OSX and OS9 but 
> not Linux.
>
> I tried using mkfs to create a vfat filesystem but that didn't work 
> either.
>
> Greg
>
> On 31/10/2003, at 3:11 PM, SStrungis wrote:
>
>> Most of those flash drives come formatted to VFAT off the shelf.  
>> That way you can use them on PCs, Macs, and Linux boxen.  It's pretty 
>> much the only FS that works with all three major platforms.
>>
>> Few Linuxes will natively mount them on your desktop.  You have to 
>> command line it something along the lines of:
>>
>> mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash/
>>
>> where /flash is the rooted directory that you created beforehand.
>>
>> Scott
>>
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