the adventures of fat32, virtual machines, and linux
 

hrmm
so i finally had my computer setup and it was pretty spiffy
i had a 60 gig drive that has redhat 8 on it, and a virtual machine running win2k for the times when i need it

and then i had a 120 gig drive i was using as storage for music and stuff, which was fat32, so both virtual machine and redhat could access it
i gave the virtual machine raw access to the drive, and it was able to read/write from it fine

redhat had the same capabilities, and it was fine also
everything was working dandy, but one time when i was in win2k, i made some changes in the music folder, and i noticed it did not update in redhat

i then tried to redo the changes in redhat, assuming it was the win2k that was being fishy, and it had "generic errors"
i restarted my computer, redhat still had the old file structure, so i booted up the virtual machine

my virtual machine then said something along the lines of "hi, your hd is now messed up, let me go ahead and recover your data, put it in a big folder called FOUND.000 filled with FILE___.CHK"

so then i didnt have my music anymore, and i was like "hey, what is this poo" and i did a 'rename *.chk *.mp3' which "fixed" the problem
i had just moved all the stuff to the 120 gig drive like yesterday, so nothing was really fragmented, and all of my songs had proper 1d3 tags
so it looked like it may not be that bad, just use something like ID3-TagIt to rename all the file names according to id3 tag
but of course, every single file had jumping/skipping in it fro being fuxx0red

so that was the end to about 42 gigs, aka 3 years for, of a music collection, which i just spent the last month organizing and fixing id3 tags

now my question isnt like "how do i fix skipping mp3s?" no.
i just want to know what i did wrong, so after i redownload everything, i dont do it again

thanks

What is the virtual machine? Do you mean win4lin or vmware ... ? That's a possibility.

I suspect that your /etc/fstab may be wrong and the windows files weren't checked properly.

If you're sure it's correct, don't bother but what's your /etc/fstab look like?

Bert

vmware

fstab:
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/storage vfat defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

in redhat setup, i set that drive's mountpoint as /mnt/storage
other than that i didnt touch anything

Aha!
 

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/storage vfat defaults 1 3

would have saved your system. Probably.
With the dump frequency set to zero and and the fsck check at zero, the system doesn't even look at the state of your vfat fs before mounting it - it just assumes everything's OK.

If the dump freq is set to one (doesn't really mean much though) and the fsck is set to 3, the system will do an fsck on / then /boot then /mnt/storage.

Yes. There is a massive performance hit at boot time (especially on the size of your disk). But that's the price you pay for keeping your fs integrity assured. If you really want to get round this, think about keeping a journalled fs instead of vfat (vfat is a dodgy fs anyway). Look at reiserfs and ext3 (which has fewer bugs now).

Bert

so it should be fine if i just change it to
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/storage vfat defaults 1 3 ?
or is there somethign else i have to worry about?

and win2k cant read journalized fs can it? i want to be able to have windows on vmware and linux both access the hd
but without anything messing up :\

Well, change that first of all, yeah. Have a look at the man page for fstab - it explains what those columns mean better than I can.

I don't like the sound of the the raw access from the vitual machine! Can you explain what you did there?

This whole problem has come about because the files on the partitions were not written properly (or synced properly if they're different disks).

THat could be because of your fsck not checking or because of vmware.

Bert

i just setup my /dev/hdb device up as a "raw disk"
i had to setup my cdr as raw ands tuff to burn cds anyway, so i assumed it was fine

and i dont think it was windows that had the issue
it was handling things fine, but it didnt seem to update and stuff in linux

what would be the easiest way to setup a hard drive to share between win2k vm and linux? would it be easier to to just make it ext3 or something and get somethin that can handle ext3 for win (if it exists?) :\

someone has had to have done this before hehe

I'm gonna leave you with a recommendation and hopefully someone with more experience with vmware can help.

Sharing the filesystem using vfat is a good idea. It's a good idea to allow the fsck check on it at boot time too. I don't recommend accessing it with vmware though. Think of using vmware in Linux to reliably access another OS like a miraculous but rather dangerous procedure.

Reboot into Windows if you can stand it. Then you're less likely to run into problems and could possibly turn off the boot time fsck check (by setting the fstab entry back to 0 0).

Can I guess it's to use Kazaa? We feel your pain. I use Gnutella on Linux but Kazaa simply kicks more ass in this department.

Bert

ya
kazaa roxxors :< (well, k++ with autosearchmore :P)

there were some little things also, but i guess i can just upload them and redownload, or just burn cds without finishing off to transfer
i bought a 48x cd r and 200 blank cds to burn all the music.... before i lost it all

so i guess i can just use them :P
i was just wondering if there was an easy way out i wasnt seeing :\

thanks for all the help though :>