[ltp] FC3 wrongly mounted an NTFS partn for a FAT32 partn

[Kelvin KAN]

Hello,

Again, I am sure FC3 was undesirably mounting my NTFS partition 
(/dev/hda6), when I had **explicitly** specified the "-t vfat" option to 
mount the fat32 partition (/dev/hda5).  I know it sounds funny and 
strange, but true.   I couldn't mistake about the formats because I  
formatted hda5 & hda6 under XP by hand myself (Cmd shell: format 
FS:fat32 or ntfs, not using any auto-tools).

A little background story 3 yrs ago - my desktop PC's w2k NTFS w/ 
important data was corrupt so seriously that moving the drive to any 
other w2k systems would simply crash the host system (BSOD).  As a last 
resort, I attempted to use Linux to rescue it.  But NTFS was not a 
standard feature that time and I had to search/install the NTFS modules 
(still beta).  To my surprise, RH7.3 worked perfectly to read back all 
the NTFS data i.e. Linux was better than w2k to mount NTFS :)  After 
that incident, that was why I decided to keep an FAT32 partn as a bridge 
between MS & Linux world.


Back to this FC3/vfat problem, now that I've re-part'd the whole drive 
and everything works as expected.  I "mount -t vfat /dev/hda5" and all 
my fat32 data is accessible.


Thanks for all your suggestion!
-
kelvin.



Andreas wrote:

>Hello,
>
>
>>I've been using that NTFS partn (/dev/hda6) for years and could not have
>>mistaken about it's format.  Furthermore, fdisk of FC3 also reported it
>>to be NTFS (requoted here):
>>
>
>fdisk reports only the type of the partition as recorded in the partition 
>table and this has nothing to do with the actual filesystem on it. You can 
>easily do "mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda6" and fdisk will still tell you it's NTFS.
>Since you can mount the partition have look at the output of "mount". It is 
>more reliable. 
>
>
>>But I am glad that after 3 yrs 
>>of not attempting to mount NTFS from Linux (terrible experience of
>>searching the packages everywhere and scared by the warning about no
>>guarantee for the NTFS data integrity), that now NTFS mounting seems to
>>be a built-in feature of FC3, but not at the right time for me :)
>>
>
>If you mount NTFS read-only it should not give you any trouble and you don't 
>need any special tools for it. Writing is different and AFAIK you can only 
>overwrite files (without changing the length of the file), but perhaps my 
>information is outdated. 
>
>Wish you luck
> Andreas
>
>