[Fwd: VFAT Filesystem Unrecognized]

Joe Pranevich (joepran@telerama.lm.com)
Tue, 01 Jul 1997 19:42:07 -0400


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Message-ID: <33B9922C.F5B18415@telerama.lm.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 1997 19:26:36 -0400
From: Joe Pranevich <joepran@telerama.lm.com>
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To: consp05@binghamton.edu
Subject: Re: VFAT Filesystem Unrecognized
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SethMeister G. wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
> I have had this problem for a long time now, but I am just writing
> about it now (because I am fed up with it :)) -- I have a vfat filesystem
> that works just fine in windows 95, but does not want to work in linux.
> The error I get is the syslog is:
>
> [MS-DOS FS Rel. 12,FAT 16,check=n,conv=b,uid=0,gid=0,umask=077]
> [me=0xf8,cs=16,#f=2,fs=1,fl=168,ds=337,de=512,data=369,se=0,ts=717633,ls=512]
> Transaction block size = 512
> VFS: Can't find a valid MSDOS filesystem on dev 03:05.
>
> I have other vfat filesystems that work fine, but this one does not. I
> had similar problems with another filesystem and I think what I did to
> correct it was to re-SYS the disk in windows 95 but I'm not 100% sure if
> that was the fixer. This leads me to believe that the linux vfat driver
> is not recognizing the first sector properly ( I say that because I tried
> dd'ing another partition's first sector over the first sector on the
> partition that wasn't working and it mounted (but, of course this is not a
> fix because the data on the mounted on the partition was only a directory
> on the partition (e.g.: the mounted filesystem was corrupt)) So I
> restored the original bootsector on that partition and again it was
> unmountable. I am enclosing the 1-st 512-byte sector below for your
> browsing pleasure :).
>
> -Seth

Well, from your boot sector it certainly looks to be a valid FAT 16
partition. (Not looking at the actual structure (I *could* check
that...), but from the convent FAT16 in the header. :) ) However, the
partition was created from Windows "4.1" which would correspond to
Windows OSR 2. (A version of Win95 that was released only to OEMs that
included some updates including FAT32, for all you people out there that
really don't care :) )

Have you tried mounting it using FAT32? That's a really dumb thing to
ask since you've done this much already, but it could be that it has the
FAT16 label as some sort of backwards compatibility.

Failing that, I haven't heard of it, but Microsoft *could* have added
something extra to VFAT in the intervening months that is causing your
problem.

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