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Chad--24216
Asked: 2012-07-03 12:02:56 +0800 CST

How to change FAT32 sort order on drive?

  • 772

I use a USB drive to play music in my car. Unfortunately, the car does not sort the music alphabetically and relies on how the music is sorted on the FAT32 drive.

This Windows software here solves the problem. Anything comparable available for me on Ubuntu?

PS: at first I thought it was a file creation date problem askubuntu question. But although I figured out the answer to that question, it didn't solve the problem like I thought it would.

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4 Answers

  1. You might want to use fatsort which is available in Ubuntu and was designed to solve your exact problem. Cheers,

    • 17

  2. fatsort solves the problem. First install fatsort then, list partitions in order to get the usb key device path

    cat /proc/partitions

    Let's take /dev/sde1 as an example.

    Finally

    sudo fatsort -f /dev/sde1

    problem solved, without wine nor windows ;-)

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  3. Your best bet is to use DriveSort under Wine, as its author recommends

    To quote DriveSort's author, the program is "tightly bound to Microsoft APIs", so I doubt you will find a native Linux equivalent where a non-native filesystem (FAT) is concerned.

    You can run it under Wine as the author has tried and recommended, with some caveats:

    • You must run it with gksudo
    • You will need mfc42u.dll, which you can install in the same directory from the internet (google), or install it using the winetricks package.
    • Once sorting is completed, DriveSort attempts to unmount/remount the drive; remounting doesn't succeed in Wine, so you can either safely pull out the USB for use, or manually remount it.
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  4. It is a lazy solution, but you could just move the files out and than in again ...

    create a temporary dir

    mkdir /tmp/mydrive

    move all files out

    mv /media/thumbdrive/* /tmp/mydrive

    and then all in again

    mv /tmp/mydrive/* /media/thumbdrive

    this might get the files in the thumbdrive in alfabetical order. I am not sure though ... Try it out

    You might also want to look at: Sort files on the filesystem (same question) and at: http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0010.html (some program recomendations)

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