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From: James Raynard <fqueries@jraynard.demon.co.uk>
Message-Id: <199608052128.VAA03459@jraynard.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Status of MSDOS filesystem support?
To: Larry Lentner <larry@avalon.cbl.cees.edu>
Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 21:28:12 +0000 ()
Cc: questions@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199608051640.MAA14347@avalon.cbl.cees.edu> from "Larry Lentner" at Aug 5, 96 12:40:36 pm
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> 
> I've been hearing rumors that "the next release" of FreeBSD would 
> have support for MSDOS filesystems, but it doesnt appear that 2.1.5
> does. Is that in the works for 2.2?

FreeBSD 2.1.5 does indeed have support for MSDOS filesystems, but
it has one or two nasty bugs; if the MSDOS filesystem was shrunk
using a program called 'fips', it can result in corruption of the
DOS filesystem *or* FreeBSD ones.  This support is being re-written
from scratch for 2.2, which should also support the new FAT32 (or
whatever it's called) that Microsoft are introducing to get around
one of the limitations of the original 16-bit DOS filesystem.

In the meantime, the mtools package offers a simple and safe way of 
performing basic operation such as copying, moving and deleting 
files on a DOS filesystem from within FreeBSD.