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trouble mounting a FAT32 IDE drive with usb adapter. thinks a 520Mb disk is 2000Gb

cn flag

I have one of those 40 pin IDE to usb adapters. I can use this and mount an ext4 drive, but an older FAT32 drive will not mount.

sudo mount /dev/sdb /targetdirectory

gives me mount: /media/.../...: can't read superblock on /dev/sdb.

 sudo parted -l /dev/sdb

Error: /dev/sdb: unrecognised disk label Model: Initio MK2326FC (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 2199GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: unknown Disk Flags

do I need some kind of FAT32 driver or something.

gparted does not pick up the drive. and I am vague on what I did, but using an IDE to sata adapter which did pick it up, doing a dd if= style backup attempt it went on and on thinking the drive was 2000Gb as per the above results did not complete (or I gave up).

all part of a project to get a 486 with 128mb of ram to run linux (someone else has done it) and, more urgently, to get a backup of these old FAT32 disks before they go kaput. (Clonezilla does not work with IDE/sata adapters either.)

pierrely avatar
cn flag
being able to mount and use the ext4 IDE drive means that the 40 pins is all that is needed, so it is not, at least for the newer 40Gb drive, a problem of getting external power to the unused 4 pins (power)
guiverc avatar
cn flag
You've provided no OS/release details; but you do show you attempting to mount a device and not partition. The standard used by PCs using microsoft or IBM systems (DOS, OS/2 & windows) was to have a partition table & thus partitions which contained the file-system, not drive & file-system only (no partition table) so was this a Unix system? (*where no partition table was common*)
pierrely avatar
cn flag
no sdb1 showed up. no, it was a dos/windows system. and a very old one, like 1995. and that drive is still booting into dos 6.2x on the old computer.
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