George's Weblog

It's been a while since I've used my Philips DVP5992 DVD player. It plays DIVX files and all kinds of other media. I got the idea that I would upgrade it to the latest firmware if there was any, just for kicks.

A quick search for firmware yielded an upgrade right from Philips. They recommended that I use a USB drive to load it up and added that I needed it to be FAT32. This makes sense and is the same as my PS3. I remembered that I had a small flash drive that was a handout at some trade show so I found it.

The trouble that I found was that MacOS X 10.6.2 wanted to format it FAT16 and there was no option for FAT32. I figured it might just be looking at the size of the drive and deciding that FAT16 would be more appropriate since this thing was only 512MB. Well, that might have been fine under different circumstances but I wanted FAT32.

A Google search yielded a few worthwhile links but nothing that had all the steps listed so here goes:

First, you want your drive inserted, a partition on it (via Disk Utility) but you don't want it mounted since you can't format the filesystem when it's mounted. You can find out what's mounted and where though by using the mount command. My drive was mounted as follows:

/dev/disk2s1 on /Volumes/TURIN (msdos, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)

To dismount the volume, I used the diskutil command (as root):

diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s1

Volume TURIN on disk2s1 unmounted

Then I could create the filesystem:

newfs_msdos -F 32 -v TURIN /dev/disk2s1

newfs_msdos: warning: /dev/disk2s1 is not a character device

512 bytes per physical sector

/dev/disk2s1: 1013416 sectors in 126677 FAT32 clusters (4096 bytes/cluster)

bps=512 spc=8 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf0 spt=32 hds=54 hid=0 bsec=1015434 bspf=990 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=6