I bought a brand new 64GB CF card and when it arrived I tried to use partitionmanager to format it as a single FAT32 partition. Every time I tried it told me there was an error. Running the fsck.fat commands manually I kept seeing errors: [root@wraith ~]# fsck.fat -a -w -v /dev/sdg1 fsck.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24) Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem FSINFO sector has bad magic number(s): Offset 0: 0x40615252 != expected 0x41615252 Offset 484: 0x60417272 != expected 0x61417272 Auto-correcting it. Filesystem has 1691491 clusters but only space for 1662974 FAT entries. [root@wraith ~]# echo $? 1 No matter what I tried to do in partitionmanager, it would fail and fsck.fat would show similar errors that it couldn't resolve: [root@wraith ~]# fsck.fat -a -w -v /dev/sdg1 fsck.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24) Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem FSINFO sector has bad magic number(s): Offset 0: 0x40615252 != expected 0x41615252 Offset 484: 0x60417272 != expected 0x61417272 Auto-correcting it. Boot sector contents: System ID "lkfs.f`t" Media byte 0xf8 (hard disk) 512 bytes per logical sector 32768 bytes per cluster 64 reserved sectors First FAT starts at byte 32768 (sector 64) 2 FATs, 32 bit entries 6553600 bytes per FAT (= 12800 sectors) Root directory start at cluster 2 (arbitrary size) Data area starts at byte 13139968 (sector 25664) 1631599 data clusters (53464236032 bytes) 32 sectors/track, 64 heads 2048 hidden sectors 104448000 sectors total Cluster 0 out of range (251657976 > 1631600). Setting to EOF. Reclaiming unconnected clusters. Checking free cluster summary. Free cluster summary uninitialized (should be 1631598) Auto-setting. Performing changes. /dev/sdg1: 1 files, 1/1631599 clusters [root@wraith ~]# fsck.fat -r -w -v -V /dev/sdg1 fsck.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24) Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem FSINFO sector has bad magic number(s): Offset 0: 0x40615252 != expected 0x41615252 Offset 484: 0x60417272 != expected 0x61417272 1) Correct 2) Don't correct (FSINFO invalid then) ? 1 Boot sector contents: System ID "lkfs.f`t" Media byte 0xf8 (hard disk) 512 bytes per logical sector 32768 bytes per cluster 64 reserved sectors First FAT starts at byte 32768 (sector 64) 2 FATs, 32 bit entries 6553600 bytes per FAT (= 12800 sectors) Root directory start at cluster 2 (arbitrary size) Data area starts at byte 13139968 (sector 25664) 1631599 data clusters (53464236032 bytes) 32 sectors/track, 64 heads 2048 hidden sectors 104448000 sectors total Starting check/repair pass. Cluster 0 out of range (251657976 > 1631600). Setting to EOF. Checking for unused clusters. Checking free cluster summary. Free cluster summary uninitialized (should be 1631598) 1) Set it 2) Leave it uninitialized ? 1 Starting verification pass. Checking for unused clusters. Perform changes ? (y/n) y /dev/sdg1: 1 files, 1/1631599 clusters [root@wraith ~]# fatlabel /dev/sdg1 FSINFO sector has bad magic number(s): Offset 0: 0x40615252 != expected 0x41615252 Offset 484: 0x60417272 != expected 0x61417272 Auto-correcting it. Filesystem has 1691401 clusters but only space for 1662974 FAT entries. [root@wraith ~]# fsck.fat -r -w -v -V /dev/sdg1 fsck.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24) Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem FSINFO sector has bad magic number(s): Offset 0: 0x40615252 != expected 0x41615252 Offset 484: 0x60417272 != expected 0x61417272 1) Correct 2) Don't correct (FSINFO invalid then) ? 1 Filesystem has 1691401 clusters but only space for 1662974 FAT entries. [root@wraith ~]# [root@wraith ~]# [root@wraith ~]# [root@wraith ~]# fsck.fat -r -w -v -V /dev/sdg1 fsck.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24) Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem There are differences between boot sector and its backup. This is mostly harmless. Differences: (offset:original/backup) 135:6e/6f, 167:6e/6f 1) Copy original to backup 2) Copy backup to original 3) No action ? 3 FSINFO sector has bad magic number(s): Offset 0: 0x40615252 != expected 0x41615252 Offset 484: 0x60417272 != expected 0x61417272 1) Correct 2) Don't correct (FSINFO invalid then) ? 1 Filesystem has 1691401 clusters but only space for 1662974 FAT entries. [root@wraith ~]# [root@wraith ~]# [root@wraith ~]# fsck.fat -r -w -v -V /dev/sdg1 fsck.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24) Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem FSINFO sector has bad magic number(s): Offset 0: 0x40615252 != expected 0x41615252 Offset 484: 0x60417272 != expected 0x61417272 1) Correct 2) Don't correct (FSINFO invalid then) ? 1 Filesystem has 1691401 clusters but only space for 1662974 FAT entries. Eventually I gave up and installed parted and used that, which worked perfectly. After gparted had created the desired partition, I could use KDE partitionmanager to remove the partition table, create a new one, and create a FAT32 partition without any problems. As far as I can tell, what gparted did differently is an extra step, "clear old file system signatures in /dev/sdg1". Presumably this wiped away some bad metadata on the CF card that paritionmanager didn't remove and which was confusing fsck.fat. Although it was 100% reproducable at first, I'm afraid I can't reproduce the errors now to check the old metadata, because after using gparted everything is OK. The step that gparted shows in its log is: clear old file system signatures in /dev/sdg1 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS ) write 512.00 KiB of zeros at byte offset 0 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS ) write 4.00 KiB of zeros at byte offset 67108864 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS ) write 512.00 KiB of zeros at byte offset 64028672000 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS ) write 4.00 KiB of zeros at byte offset 64029130752 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS ) write 8.00 KiB of zeros at byte offset 64029188096 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS ) flush operating system cache of /dev/sdg 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS )
I forgot to say that when the card arrived it didn't have any partitions created. I would have hoped that paritionmanager could be used to do the initial format of a new disk, and completely wipe away whatever is needed to do it correctly.
Created attachment 122468 [details] Output of failed attempt to format CF card This is the output of one of the paritionmanager runs that gave an error.
Created attachment 122469 [details] Output of successful format by gparted
(In reply to Jonathan Wakely from comment #3) > Created attachment 122469 [details] > Output of successful format by gparted Partition manager also wipes file system signatures, it runs wipefs. Looks like file system size on that CF card exceeded free space on that card, this would be the first step to try to reproduce your problem. Still, I don't understand why partitionmanager ends up in error. Did it say what error?
The first attachment is all that paritionmanager told me. I tried running the failing commands by hand on the terminal, and the output of those is shown in comment 0.
I tried creating smaller partitions to try and avoid exceeding some limit, but it still said there were more clusters than there was space for FAT entries, e.g. [root@wraith ~]# fsck.fat -r -w -v -V /dev/sdg1 fsck.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24) Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem FSINFO sector has bad magic number(s): Offset 0: 0x40615252 != expected 0x41615252 Offset 484: 0x60417272 != expected 0x61417272 1) Correct 2) Don't correct (FSINFO invalid then) ? 1 Filesystem has 1599615 clusters but only space for 1572862 FAT entries. Even when I tried something like a 32GiB partition I got that same error from fsck.fat.