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Accessing fat32 drive?

Started by os2monkey, 2007.09.17, 20:10:43

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os2monkey

Hi,

I just installed ecomstation 1.2r on a system.
I have a fat32 partition on an external usb drive that I am trying to access so I can transfer a network card driver to my new ECS system.

When I plug in the drive it says it was attached and assigns a drive letter, but if I try to browse it via local system/drive, none of the files or folders show up (it says "no objects where found that match specified find criteria".)

It is possible to access a fat32 partition or is there some way else to do this?

If ECS can not access fat32, is there another partition type that both ecs and windows can read?

Thanks,
David Kiley

Pete

Hi

Do you have the fat32 drivers installed? - sounds like you may not.

There is a os2fat32.zip package on CD2 somewhere...

If you do not have any fixed drive fat32 partitions you will need to use the /F switch with CACHEF32.EXE to force the fat32 drivers to load at boot - they default to not loading if no fat32 partitions/volumes are found at boot.

Hope the above helps

Pete


os2monkey

Hi,
Thanks for the advice. I did not have the fat32 driver loaded. Unfortunatly I have it loaded now but yet it still doesn't seem to be working for me.

I copied these files to the /os2 directory:
FAT32.IFS
CACHEF32.EXE
F32STAT.EXE
f32mon.EXE

and this file to /os2/dll:
UFAT32.DLL

and then I added these lines to config.sys:
IFS=C:\OS2\FAT32.IFS /HIGH /EAS /CACHE:2048
CALL=C:\OS2\CACHEF32.EXE /F

I am seeing the fat32 drivers loading at boot time, but yet
yet when I click to open the usb hard drive it reports "your drive or diskette is not formatted correctly".
But I can take this same usb hard drive and plug it into a windows machine, and it sees the drive fine.

Is there something wrong with what I did to load the driver?

Thanks very much,
David Kiley

DavidG

#3
I prefer to install using the Warpin version.  Also, you need version 9.11.  I use a testcase version of the FAT32 driver that supposedly increases the read speed.  However, this version may never be officially released since the developer no longer has time to work further on the driver.  I and others have been using this driver for over a year without problems.

The lazywrite cache is disabled because on attachable drives, write access slows to a crawl when enabled.

If installing this driver, be sure to delete the other fat32 files you placed on your drive or problems may occur.


DavidG

One other thing.  Quite a few flash drives out of the box will not work on eCS unless the partition has been destroyed and recreated by LVM. Make the drive partition primary.  If possible, format fat32 with Windows.  DFSee can be used to format FAT32, however, I have encountered problems with the format process sometimes that causes me to start the whole process over again. 

os2monkey

I'm sorry :) I'm a total newbie to os/2 so I don't yet know what "Warpin" is. How do I install that?

Thanks

DavidG

Warpin is an installation program used by many OS/2 and eCS developers.  The latest version can be found at

http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/util/archiver/warpin-1-0-15.zip

Unzip and double click on it to install.  Accept its defaults when installing.  After installation, just download and double on any *.wpi file to install an eCS or OS/2 program using this installation program.  Thus, for the fat32 driver, just double click on the

fat32_20060608.wpi

to install the fat32 driver.

BigWarpGuy


DavidG

I heard it was impossible under eCS to get a 8 GB USB stick drive to work under eCS.  So I went and bought a Memorex 8 GB travel drive.  After much experimentation, I thought the poster was correct.  However, I persisted and succeeded.  As near as I can tell, the Master Boot Record has to be fixed by DFSee before the drive will work under eCS.  The full story can be found on the Yahoo FAT32user group.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/fat32user/

What I noticed before I got it working was that if LVM is unable to create a new partition, then more than likely, the drive will not work correctly under eCS although it has no problems working under Windows.

os2monkey

Hi Everyone,  Thanks for all of the advice.. I finally got it working :) I installed warpin version (9.11) as suggested and I also moved the data off of the drive temporarily and partitioned it with LVM but formatted it with windows.
Now I have 150GB of fat32 space working fine :).

Of course now i'm struggleing to get the mouse scroll to work right, but at least i'm still here :).

Thanks again.