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Re: Umsdos over VFAT?



On Wed, 5 Mar 1997, Amos Shapira wrote:

> I'd like to share 500Mb between Linux and the NT/Lose95 I'll install
> one day.  The obvious choice is VFAT since it is (relatively) the best
> filesystem which Win95 supports (as far as I'm aware).

there's fat32, supported only by win95 OSR2 and no other known OS on
earth, including NT or non-OSR2 versions (i.e. Hebrew variations.)

or in short: yeah, that's correct.

> The trouble is that it doesn't support file infosuch as
> owner/permissions/groups, symlinks (very important to me), special
> files, etc..., so I suspect that I'll have to use UMSDOS over it.

nope. FAT has 8.3 directory entries, and vFAT is a regular fat partition,
that ILLEGALLY uses extra entries in the directory, marks them with the
"vol" flag and uses it to store extended name data.
Now I say "illegal" and I mean that normal DOS won't see the extra info,
or even worse: old Utils like Norton, PCtools and others that check such
partitions, may kill long filenames by "fixing" those "wrong entries".

so to see the regular fat, you mount -t msdos
to see the "hacked" vFAT extensions, mount -t vfat

UMSDOS stores the extra info (long filename, ownership, modifiers) in a
propper 8.3 file, i.e. incompatable with win95's scheme for long names.

> Does anyone know if it's possible?  I managed to mount a VFAT
> filesystem as umsdos, but I wander if it's going to screw up the
> partition when Win95 access it as a VFAT.

it won't screw up, BUT, if you try to run ls on an msdos (maybe also
umsdos) mounted volume that has long filenames, you will get kernel alerts
about volume not mounted -t vfat.

the only thing you can ruin, is rewriting or moving a long-named file
without mounting the disk as vfat. you may discover the win95 doesn't find
that file anymore because it actually changed it's name, and chopped it to
a case insensitive 8.3 filename...



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