mkisofs -dvd-video from a fat32 filesystem

[gboyce2 at badbelly.com (Gregory Boyce)]

On Fri, 2003-07-04 at 12:19, Darxus at chaosreigns.com wrote:

> As a last resort, I could repartition this disk into half ext3 and half
> fat32, but... that would be a pretty unhappy solution.

Linux supports mounting filesystems using the loop device.  That means
that you can have a large file containing an ext2 filesystem that you
can mount, allowing you to have a ext2/ext3 filesystem without
repartitioning.

First create a file of the filesystem size you want.  This should give
you around a gig:
dd if=/dev/zero of=outputfile bs=1024k count=1000

Then create a filesystem on the file:
mkfs.ext3 outputfile

Then mount it (making sure /mnt/loop works):
mount -o loop outputfile /mnt/loop

Note that I can't be sure that this will work. Some filesystems
apparently have bugs that don't allow you to mount filesystems over the
loop partition from them.  I've heard this about ntfs, I'm not totally
sure about vfat.

Once you're done using the filesystem, you can just go ahead and umount
and delete it if you want.

-- 
Gregory Boyce <gboyce2 at badbelly.com>