[Bug-gnupod] Problem with mkfs.vfat on 4G Ipod Mini

[K.R. Foley]

Hi,

I sent this entire email to Alan Donovan also. I am sending it to the 
contact emails for all of the pages that helped me with my ipod, in 
hopes that my experience can help someone else.

I had reasonably good luck with hpfsplus and gtkpod on my Fedora Core 3 
system (with a
recent kernel). However, the hpfs tools suck. So the first time you
disconnect without unmounting or some such, you're looking at a hack job
to fix it. Because since the second time that happened my space
reporting has been hosed, I decided to change over to fat. Anyway, using
your guide and someone else's as well, I ran into problems with mkfs.vfat.

address@hidden ipod]# mkfs.vfat -F 32 -I -n "My iPod" /dev/sda2
mkfs.vfat 2.8 (28 Feb 2001)
mkfs.vfat: failed whilst writing reserved sector

Every combination I tried produced this result. Even tried ext2 which
worked fine. This was a clue for me. What I did then was go back to
fdisk and rather than create two partitions, I created three. The third
just has one block in it like so:

Disk /dev/sda: 4095 MB, 4095737856 bytes
126 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1024 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 7812 * 512 = 3999744 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1           9       35123    0  Empty
/dev/sda2              10        1023     3960684   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            1024        1024        3906   83  Linux

This is before changing sda2 to be type b. This did the trick. I got no
complaints from mkfs.vfat anymore. I am still in the process of putting
everything back on the disk, but so far so good. I just thought I would
pass this along and maybe help someone else.

Thanks again,

--
   kr