Filesystems

Documentation how to use the Alpine distro to format HD/Floppy/Other.

Install

Alpine has multiple storage media formatting packages available. Different packages/programs are used to format different types of filesystems.

• dosfstools - For FAT12/FAT16/FAT32
• reiserfsprogs - For ReiserFS (Note: not available in Alpine repositories yet)
• e2fsprogs - For ext3/ext4
• xfsprogs - For XFS
• jfsutils - For JFS
• ntfs-3g - For NTFS (Note: ntfs-3g is a FUSE driver)
• btrfs-progs - For BTRFS

In our example we want to format the floppy as vfat.

apk add dosfstools

Format

Here are some examples on how to use the formatting tools:

dosfstools

mkfs.vfat /dev/fd0

e2fsprogs

mkfs.ext2 /dev/fd0 mkfs.ext3 /dev/fd0 mkfs.ext4 /dev/fd0

btrfs-progs

mkfs.btrfs /dev/fd0

Other devices

In our case we want to format a floppy disk. (/dev/fd0) You can change /dev/fd0 to the device you want to format.

Partitions

If you need to change or make a partition table on a Hard Drive you want to format, you can use:

fdisk

fdisk /dev/hdc