[PLUG] Transfer from thumb drive to Windows computer

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Sun May 7 16:04:09 UTC 2006


On Sat, 6 May 2006 14:36:18 -0700
John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> dijo:

> This is not making any sense at all. What eldritch stuff did Microsoft
> do here?

Just now it occurred to me to try additional files. So I placed a couple more random files on the thumb drive from the Ubuntu laptop and moved it to my Windows desktop. Windows still couldn't see anything but reglog.txt. And while it was on the Windows desktop I copied several random files to it from the Windows desktop, then moved it back to the Ubuntu laptop. Ubuntu still can't see reglog.txt, nor can it see any of the the files I put on it when it was on the Windows desktop.

Now I have a clearer picture of the problem - both computers can see files they placed on the thumb drive, but neither can see files placed there by the other OS. I still don't understand why this is happening. It's just FAT32. I don't think FAT32 can handle permissions, so that shouldn't be an issue. "Show hidden files" is enabled in Windows Explorer and in all the file managers I have on Linux.

All of the files on the thumb drive are just copies, therefore expendable. I'm thinking about just reformatting it. It's /dev/sda and the partition is sda1. I googled for the command and I think it would be sudo mkfs, but when I looked at man mkfs it listed tons of options, of which I understood only one -- unless you specify a filesystem it will format it ext2. Clearly I need it to be FAT32, but the man page didn't give the syntax for that parameter. Anyone know a more complete tutorial on formatting commands?



More information about the PLUG mailing list