Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 17:31:30 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: jfielden@geocities.com Cc: FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: Warning message, what does it mean? Message-ID: <19970919173130.36808@lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <3420B71B.415273F1@lazy.org>; from Joshua Fielden on Thu, Sep 18, 1997 at 01:07:39AM -0400 References: <3421E6FC.3C97F979@ms11.hinet.net> <19970919134926.56921@lemis.com> <3420B71B.415273F1@lazy.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Thu, Sep 18, 1997 at 01:07:39AM -0400, Joshua Fielden wrote: > Greg Lehey wrote: >> >> On Fri, Sep 19, 1997 at 10:44:12AM +0800, Doug Lo wrote: >>> Hi, >>> >>> When I boot FreeBSD, I got a warning message as below: >>> >>> mountmsdosfs(): Warning: root directory is not a multiple of the >>> clustersize in length. >>> >>> Would anyone tell me what it means? >> >> Well, the immediate meaning is obvious. >> >>> Should I notice it? >> >> Bearing in mind the flaky condition of msdosfs, I'd be very careful. >> I don't know if things have improved, since I don't use Microsoft, but >> there were times when anomalies in the file system structure could >> cause msdosfs to overwrite not only its own partition, but also >> neighbouring ones. If you must mount the file system, do it >> read-only, at least until somebody more knowledgeable than I tells you >> that the coast is clear. > > I got this after I used "FIPS" to shrink a DOS partition to install BSD. > It's got to ddo with the trick of fooling the drive into shrinking the > partition but not recalculating clusters. <so you don't need to > reformat> If you used Partition Magic, FIPS, etc to shrink a DOS > partition, I wouldn't worry too much. This is exactly the situation I was referring to. If I were you, I'd worry. FIPS doesn't do a perfect job, and it leaves pointers outside the slice. If you're unlucky, msdosfs will use one of these pointers and place random garbage in other slices. Greg
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19970919173130.36808>