New drive already has vfat after new fdisk

[Andy Green]

Nat Gross wrote:

> What I fail to understand is that I expect to have 3 partitions.

When you change the partition table with fdisk you only wrote back
usually one sector of data at the beginning of the drive, everything
else was left as it was before.  That's why it was suspiciously quick if
you assumed it was writing 200GB :-)

Your new partition table, and the old one that you overwrote, both
decided to start the first partition at the same place in the underlying
storage.  Therefore for the special case of /dev/sda1, your new,
"unformatted" partition lined up perfectly with the first 190GB or
whatever it was of the as-yet not overwritten VFAT filesystem from the
factory that was living in the original first partition.  Until it tried
to write to the end of it, which you used up on your other two
partitions, it looks like a perfectly fine VFAT filesystem in there.

> Can I just unmount and mkfs? What about sda2 and sda3? Where are they?

Yep.

umount /dev/sda1   <--- thanks to Terry :-)
mkfs.ext2 -j /dev/sda1

-Andy
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