I need some help repairing a vfat filesystem. This is OT because the filesystem is on a friend's win98 box, but is On-Topic because I tried using woody's installer and fsck.vfat to fix it.
The situation :
The other day he got an error message in windows regarding the
filesystem. Another computer-savvy friend of his was present and knew
the situation wasn't good. When the machine boots up now it starts to
run scandisk (the DOS version). Scandisk stops after it is about 5%
done and complains that it can't fix the problem. The startup
sequence outputs a couple more messages but windows manages to boot
and run.
I checked it out last night by booting woody's installer and running
fsck.vfat from a floppy. It reported this :
fsck 1.27 (8-Mar-2002)
dosfsck 2.8, 28 Feb 2001, FAT32, LFN
Warning: FAT32 support is still ALPHA.
Got 2318336 bytes instead of 6632364 at 16384
and refuses to do anything else. I tried a number of options
including '-a', '-r', '-V' and '-v' but didn't get any different
results (other than verbose giving more info).
Does anyone know the implications of this error and how it might be
corrected (apart from a complete reinstall)?
TIA,
-D
PS. For those of you who are idiots like me - if you run
fsck.vfat on /dev/hda instead of /dev/hda1 you'll get an error
like
Currently, only 2 FATs are supported, not 191.
The fix is to run fsck on the FAT partition, not the whole disk :-).
--
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Windows 95: "Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot"
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