fat32 corruption with 2.4.0

Heikki Lindholm (holindho@mail.niksula.cs.hut.fi)
Thu, 25 Jan 2001 12:38:31 +0200 (EET)


Hello,
I haven't seen much vfat/fat32 complaints lately, so:
2.4.0 destroyed my windows partition. There seemed to be some trouble in
2.4.0-test9, too. I don't know if this was a known problem or not, but
2.4.0-test9 wrote filenames in a wrong way. It could be observed by
running windows (98 in my case) file system checker (not scandisk, but the
graphical one) after copying some files with non-8.3 names to a fat32
partition. There was no noticable data loss, however.

Yesterday, with 2.4.0 release kernel, mounting a fat32 filesystem caused
data loss. The filesystem seemed to mount ok at a first glance, but
reported falsely 100% space usage. Then, after unmounting it, the oldest
(probably at start of the partition) directories "windows" and "my
documents" were mangled beyond recognition. I think, in this case, the
filenames got written REALLY wrong and showed as something like
"? * ~ ?. ? ?". Running scandisk caused most directories and files
in root directory to change to FILE0xxx.CHK and DIR0xxx.CHK. Most of the
data was intact, however - and subdirectories below DIR0xxx.CHK's were
good, too. I had VIA (868B) UDMA enabled, but don't think that was the
cause since it worked fine with ext2 partitions.

In addition, trying to write to vfat /floppy with 2.4.0 also didn't
work. Kernel complained about (bad?) sectors. Whereas 2.2.0 did the job
fine (obviously, to the same floppy).

-- Heikki Lindholm

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