On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 02:16:30AM +0000, Wookey wrote: > This was all going well until I picked 'Guided LVM' install. > It wanted to format > sdb1 499MB fat (ESP partition) > sdb2 250MB ext2 (/boot) > sdb3 rest of 1GB drive (LVM partition) > > This failed with a message about 'partition too small for fat-32'. > > Some investigation found that running: > # mkfs.fat /dev/sdb1 > did indeed fail: WARNING: Not enough clusters for a 32-bit FAT
This is a problem, as it appears it decided to do FAT32 and then found that there are not enough clusters. It shouldn't automatically select FAT32 in that case. That alone wouldn't make it fail though, but the result isn't valid as the number of clusters is how FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 are properly identified. > whilst > # mkfs.fat -F 16 /dev/sdb1 worked fine. > > This is odd because a 500MB fat-32 partition is recommended > (mandated?) for the UEFI ESP partition, so this really ought to work. Could it possibly have a sector size larger than 512 Bytes? In any case, if you could run mkfs.fat with the -v option, the output might show more clearly what leads it to selecting the wrong format.
