How to Format a Logical Drive for FAT32

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I have rhel 7.0 and I have a 4.2 Gb logical drive that I want to share between all the systems in my network (3 win 7 & 2 Linux)
Since FAT32 can be "read" by both windows and linux, I'd like to know if there's a way to format the logical drive as FAT32
I tried using the disks utility but got this message: Creation of file system type FAT32 is not supported (udisks-error-quark, 11)
Is there another way of formatting this drive as FAT32?

Best Regards

Guy

2U
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Responses

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture Guru 6222 points
9 May 2015 3:08 PM

Hello Guy,

A Windows 7 system cannot access your RHEL 7 system disk. Like a Windows 7 system cannot access another Windows 7 systems disk.

You need network drive sharing.

In RHEL 7 this can be achieved by installing Samba/CIFS. CIFS can make an ext4 filesystem look like a Windows 7 network share.

https://www.howtoforge.com/samba-server-installation-and-configuration-on-centos-7 gives you an example how to setup Samba on CentOS 7, which is almost the same OS as RHEL 7.

Kind regards,

Jan Gerrit

2U Active Contributor 265 points
9 May 2015 3:22 PM

Hi Jan thanks for your reply.
I am currently using samba. (it's a "default install" on rhel 7)
I can access and read and write to shared drives on my win7 systems from my rhel 7 system.
What i want to do is access a logical drive on my rhel 7 system from my win7 systems.
That's why I wanted to know if there was a way to format the logical drive as FAT32 which both Linux and
windows can "read".
I don't know what CIFS is but I'll look it up.

Best regards
Guy

2U Active Contributor 265 points
9 May 2015 3:33 PM

@Jan okay so now I understand that CIFS is the latest implementation of SMB protocol
I have samba 3.2 installed so it is using CIFS.

Best Regards

Guy

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture Guru 6222 points
9 May 2015 3:37 PM

Hello Guy,

CIFS is the official name for this type of file share, SaMBa is a name give to the SMB protocol that is used.

Still I do not understand what you want to do with the logical drive or I might misunderstand what you mean by the logical drive?
Do you mean an USB disk that can be moved from one system to another or a Virtual disk to share between KVM or VMware guests?

Or are you talking about multiple boot?

There are non Red Hat rpms that give you NTFS support. I use them on my laptop to mount the Windows 8 partition.

Kind regards,

Jan Gerrit Kootstra

2U Active Contributor 265 points
9 May 2015 4:15 PM

Hi Jan thanks for your clarification.
I'm not talking about USB drives or VMware or KVM. shares.
What I mean by a "Logical Drive" is a "drive" that is defined to and "owned" by an "Extended" partition.
A physical Hard Disk Drive (hdd) can be divided into partitions, primary partitions and extended partitions.
one can assign one or more drive letters (in the case of windows) OR mount_points (Linux/Unix) to the extended partition further sub-allocating the space in the extended partition.
These sub-allocations of space appear in the system as "drives" or more properly "Logical" Drives.
You can then format the drive as NTFS, or FAT, or FAT32 (windows) or as an ext3/4, or xfs, or FAT32 in linux.
So I have a "logical Drive in the extended partition of my rhel 7 system, that's currently formatted as xfs.
I want to format the drive as FAT32, so my windows 7 systems can access it (read/write)

Guy

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture Guru 6222 points
9 May 2015 4:36 PM

Hi Guy,

How do you want them to access the Logical drive? Via a network?

If via a network the filesystem does not matter, Samba or NFS does the file system conversion for you.

Only if you have local access via multiboot or a hypervisor that has direct disk access, then the filesystem has to be compatible to all Operating systems.

Kind regards,

Jan Gerrit Kootstra

2U Active Contributor 265 points
9 May 2015 5:30 PM

Hi Jan.
I plan on accessing the drive over the network.
I looked at using NFS, BUT my windows systems are win 7 professional which does not have an NFS Client.
The Windows NFS Client is only available on win 7 Enterprise and Ultimate.
Soooo, I have to tinker with samba so my windows 7 systems can "see" the "work" drive on my rhel 7 system.
Thank you for your help.
Cheers
Guy

SW Red Hat Guru 4022 points
11 May 2015 8:53 AM

Hello,

the System Administration Guide has a section on Samba

2U Active Contributor 265 points
11 May 2015 11:34 AM

@Stephen Wadeley
Thanks Stephen

Cheers

Guy

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