How To create msdosfs on HD?

Fbsd1 fbsd1 at a1poweruser.com
Thu Apr 29 12:29:40 UTC 2010


I have an old IDE 3.5 hard drive with FBSD Release 7.0 on it. I want to 
use it for USB disk space on XP. I bought a 'CD-r king' hard drive to 
USB cable. It will work with 2.5 & 3.5 IDE drives and sata drives. When 
I plug the USB end of the cable into a FBSD system I can mount the 3.5 
IDE 7.0 HD's da0s1a, da0s1d, da0s1e and da0s1f file systems with no 
problem. But when I plug the same drive into a XP system the USB drive 
shows in system/devices/hard drives as there but windows explorer does 
not assign a drive letter for it. I'm thinking this is because the hard 
drive has UFS format and maybe it I reformat it to fat format xp will 
assign a drive letter to it.

I know mount_msdosfs command is used to mount a HD formated with fat, 
but I could not find a FBSD command to create a msdos file system on a 
hard drive. Native dos fdisk/format is no good because it's not USB 
aware. Is there any FBSD command or port I can use to reformat the UFS 
hard drive with msdosfs?


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