FAT32 with SD cards on GNU/Linux or GParted: FAT32 grayed out
If you are a GNU/Linux user, you may have forgotten that there is a lot of people behaving in a strange way, like using NTFS or FAT32. At least, I sometimes do. Today I got a pendrive already formatted (FAT32) and, when I plugged it in, I pretended to delete its contents. Debian told me «I can’t: it’s read only». It wasn’t read only, though. It had been auto-mounted with standard methods. Since I wanted to delete all contents, I reckoned I could format it. Okay, it’s not one of the best practices because it’s a SD card and has a writing limit, but I just use it once a month.
debian:/home/edu# gparted
I umount /dev/sdf in order to format it, and… fat32 is grayed out. I can just use ext2, ext3, swap and reiserfs.
What nobody told me is that I need the dosfstools package:
debian:/home/edu# apt-get install dosfstools
And after that, everything worked fine. I now own a fat32 formatted 1Gb device.