Hello,

I just moved a heap of direcories to a 140GB fat32 partition and now most of the files I moved are 0 bytes. The old files are no longer there.

I got this message from mv:
mv: failed to preserve ownership for `/mnt/d/test-dir/123/xine_snapshot-1.png': Operation not permitted

I also had this happen when I tried to move files using konqueror.

The directories that had subdirectories have had the subdirectories emptied. I'm very frustrated with this and would like to know why this is happening and what I can do to prevent it (I'd like to keep that partition as fat32). The strange thing to me is that some files copied ok. I'm running debian testing with kernel 2.4.22. I was getting this same problem on debian stable and on an older kernel (this is one reason I upgraded).

I was originally thinking it may have caused by my HPT370 IDE controller, or the fat32 filesystem not properlly supporting my 200GB HD, which could perhaps still be the case???

This has been happening since I've had debian on this computer so I have been using cp -r;rm -r to move directories. Today I was lazy and used mv. Should I always do the two commands or am I suppsed to be able to use mv?

Is there any way I can recover moved files from an ext2 partition? Its probably been overwritten my mozillas cache, but for next time...

Any thoughts or suggestions would be apreciated,

Thanks,
Adam

there is a way to recover ext2 files. im at a another machine now, but apt-cache search undelete i think will show you. THERE IS NO WAY TO UNDELETE FROM ext3

hmmm, strange problem you have there.
the message: mv: failed to preserve ownership.... is normal. Fat32 does not support ownership flags, so when i tries, it fails. What it is saying is when you move, it tries to set ownership flags to the files in fat32, and it cant.

that happens to me all the time. but the moving should work.
try partitioning the fat32 in smaller partitions. And just in case, you can alias the mv command to a cp -r; rm -r command although that isnt a permanent solution.

Another posibility is having the partition as ext2 and try a ext2 driver for windows. never done that personallly.

ash

Yay - I was able to recover the files with gtkrecover, and now I know how to search package descriptions using apt!

Now I have a lot of renaming to do. Might upgrade my kernel to 2.4.24 and see if that helps, and I'll try downloading a window ext2 driver next time I boot into windows.

Hio,

I just had someone email me who had this same problem.

I think, yes, kindof that I no longer have this problem.
- since posting this I've made a few changes to my system and I recently I tried moving files and had no problem. Not sure what fixed it but heres whats different:

* updgraded to 2.6.2 kernel - I suspect its a bug in 2.4 fat32 filesystem

* changed fstab to mount my drive so my normal user has access ie:
/dev/hdg1 /mnt/c vfat rw,user,noauto,umask=022,uid=i 0 0

* Other things - I update my system very regularly so although unlikely it could have perhaps been insmod, mv, etc.


I still think the mv command should check the dest file size when the move has finished before deleting the original file - like for moving between file systems that is.

Anyways if you have this problem and figure out the cause I'd be interested to know.

Thanks,
Adam