*BSD News Article 76828


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!paladin.american.edu!02-newsfeed.univie.ac.at!01-newsfeed.univie.ac.at!Austria.EU.net!EU.net!nntp04.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.primenet.com!whim!lclee
From: lclee@primenet.com (Larry Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Please explain the diff between wd0a and wd0s2a
Date: 24 Aug 1996 06:30:04 -0700
Organization: Primenet
Lines: 46
Message-ID: <lclee.551.0041D0AF@primenet.com>
References: <lclee.537.021BF8A6@primenet.com> <3219267D.5F1A@www.play-hookey.com> <4vhstg$dt@anorak.coverform.lan> <321E9452.474A@www.play-hookey.com>
X-Posted-By: @204.212.52.216 (lclee)
X-Newsreader: Trumpet for Windows [Version 1.0 Rev B final beta #4]

In article <321E9452.474A@www.play-hookey.com> Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com> writes:
>From: Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com>
>Subject: Re: Please explain the diff between wd0a and wd0s2a
>Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 22:34:10 -0700

>Brian Somers wrote:

>So, I must apologize for misleading the original poster, Larry Lee, of
>this question (now lost from the thread off of my news server). However,
>my primary point from my first reply remains valid: Win95 is intolerant
>of just about everything else, and you can't safely read/write from a
>mounted ms-dos partition if the cluster size is too big for the logical
>drive size, which commonly occurs when you use FIPS. There may also be
>another problem with Win95 because of the extra room they leave for the
>long filenames. I wonder if FreeBSD 2.2 will have a 'mount_win95'
>command equivalent to 'mount_msdos' but taking these vagaries into
>account??
>-- 

>Ken

I don't want to belabor this point, but ...

I did use FIPS to partition a 2GB Win95 partition down to a about 600MB.
and I still use that partition to this day. I have run scandisk on it
many times and scan disk has never reported an error. My usage of the Win95
is not extensive, mainly word and ccmail, but I do no appear to have any
file damage in the Win95 partition.

For a while I attempted to receive all my email in unix, which included some
(big) MIME encoded word documents.  So I mounted the Win95 partition from 
FreeBSD and copied the word document to the Win95 partition. The file did not 
show up in the Windows partition either using FreeBSD's ls command or with 
the Windows command once I got there.

I believe that this is what caused the problem, I can't prove it and I'm not 
about to repeat it to try and prove it. However shortly after that I went
back to FreeBSD and had a little trouble booting.  I found that a range of 
about 50 consecutive inode had been trashed trashed, which included the inode 
for my /dev/rwd0s2f and /dev/wd0s2f.  After restoring them I found considerably
more damage in the /usr partition. I decided to reinstall FreeBSD from scratch.

I believe the problem is in the FreeBSD code probably in mount_msdos, not 
Win95 code.

Larry