Other BSD thumb drive

[web9452]

I have a thumb drive that works with app on windows but not with an app on box with BSD OS. How can I reformat the thumb drive for BSD files. And reformat it from the command line. Can I get thumb drive properties from the command line?

 

[Alain De Vos]

gpart(8)

man.freebsd.org

Do you want MBR or GPT partition table ?
Do you want UFS or ZFS as filesystem ?
All is possible.

gpart show -p

 

[SirDice]

I have a thumb drive that works with app on windows but not with an app on box with BSD OS.

So, what's the issue? Can't get it to mount? What filesystem does the drive have?

How can I reformat the thumb drive for BSD files.

Does it need to be readable on Windows? You can format it with UFS (newfs(8)), but that means Windows cannot read it anymore.

 

[web9452]

So, what's the issue? Can't get it to mount? What filesystem does the drive have?


Does it need to be readable on Windows? You can format it with UFS (newfs(8)), but that means Windows cannot read it anymore.

it is FAT32 file system. i thought that should work with BSD? I have GNUMERIC mounted on box with version 12. The drive mounts but when I try to open a file to get at files created with EXCEL it gives me an error message.

 

[smithi]

it is FAT32 file system. i thought that should work with BSD? I have GNUMERIC mounted on box with version 12. The drive mounts

When this drive is mounted, show (don't tell) the result of:

% mount -p

or at least the line for this drive.

but when I try to open a file to get at files created with EXCEL it gives me an error message.

"Try to open a file" - using which program, exactly?

Show a directory listing, or at least one example filename.

What is the exact error message?

 

[ralphbsz]

it gives me an error message

Sorry, we can't debug "an error message". We need some details of the error message. And perhaps more details of what you were attempting to do.

To begin with, Excel files use a Microsoft file format. There are some applications that run on FreeBSD which can read some Excel files, but those applications need to be installed and configured. A base FreeBSD installation can't do anything with Excel files.

 

[Mirror176]

If you can see the files to try to open then with Gnumeric then you have successfully mounted the filesystem. Running `file filename.xls` should be able to help make sense of the file by its contents if the file is readable. If it is a .xlsx file then you can treat it/rename it as a .zip file to explore its contents too. I usually use LibreOffice to get Microsoft office file compatibility; no program is perfect but it could be worth a try. Gnumeric used to require plugins be present and enabled to read Microsoft's file format; is that still the case? Otherwise it would help to have exact error output to try to diagnose where you are at this point.