Creating and mounting a FAT32 partition in a GPT disk on FreeBSD
To test my disk image tool, I set up a spare USB stick with a GPT partition table and FAT32 partition. Doing this on FreeBSD meant learning about a couple of new tools. All the necessary tools are part of the base system, so no installation is necessary. This was written based on FreeBSD 12.1.
Plug in a USB hard drive, and watch the output of dmesg to determine its name.
In my case the drive was named /dev/da1. The following commands will destroy anything
previously on that drive. Double check that the file passed to these commands is
corresponds to the disk you plugged in!
These commands require root.
Clear any existing partition table.
# gpart destroy -F /dev/da1
Make a new GPT partition table.
gpart create -s GPT /dev/da1
Make a new 200mb partition of type “efi”.
The new partition will have a device node /dev/da1p1.
# gpart add -s 200M -t efi /dev/da1
Format the new partition with the FAT32 filesystem.
# newfs_msdos -F 32 -c 1 /dev/da1p1
Mount the partition, at /mnt allowing user 1001 (me) access.
# mount_msdosfs -u 1001 /dev/da1p1 /mnt/
And then as myself (uid 1001), create a file on the disk.
$ echo "Hello, World!" > /mnt/hello.txt
Finally, to make a disk image for the purpose of testing the tool, run (as root):
# dd if=/dev/da1 of=/tmp/test.img bs=1m
Beware that the resulting file (/tmp/test.img) will be the size of the hard drive!