Date: Sat, 24 Aug 1996 08:10:59 +0200 (SAT) From: Robert Nordier <rnordier@iafrica.com> To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Cc: brianc@pobox.com, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: DOS root directory? Message-ID: <199608240611.IAA01310@eac.iafrica.com> In-Reply-To: <199608240416.NAA24844@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Aug 24, 96 01:46:39 pm
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Michael Smith wrote: > > Brian Campbell stands accused of saying: > > > > When I mount my DOS C drive (formatted by W95's format for W95) I get: > > mountmsdosfs(): Warning: root directory is not a multiple of > > the clustersize in length > > > > Is this a serious or important warning, or just something the author > > didn't think would happen and wanted to be informed of? > > It indicates that your DOS partition was shrunk at some sage, probably > by FIPS or a similar tool. The FreeBSD MSDOSFS appears particularly > unreliable with such filesystems; I would advise extreme caution. Uhm, actually it doesn't indicate use of FIPS (which wouldn't affect the cluster or root directory size). The warning will always appear when accessing FAT filesystems with a cluster size of >32 sectors (64, for instance), since a standard root directory on a hard drive has 512 entries and therefore occupies only 512 * sizeof(DIRENTRY) / SECTOR_SIZE = 32 sectors. Incidentally, the warning also appears when accessing 3.5-inch floppy disks in the new Win95 distribution format. The msdosfs doesn't inherently require a root directory allocated to cluster boundaries, but (in general) the bigger your DOS partition, the more likely it is you will experience msdosfs-related problems. So I'd agree regarding "extreme caution". -- Robert Nordier
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199608240611.IAA01310>