File visibility problem in Linux / Windows shared FAT32 partition

dineshshah · 12-30-2005, 04:39 PM

I've set up a FAT32 partition to share files between my Linux (Debian r3.01) and WindowsXP OS's on my dual boot machine.

I have a strange problem in that I can create files on the FAT32 partition in WindowsXP and have them visible in Linux but
if I create files under Linux on that partition I cannot see them under WindowsXP (I can of course see them from Linux).
Even more strange, if I modify a file under Linux (that was originally created under WindowsXP) that change is not visible under WindowsXP!

After a lot of searching for answers the only posting I could find suggested I set the fstab option sync in order to flush the cache. This had no affect however.

Here's my entry in fstab:
/dev/hda9 /mnt/osshare vfat users,owner,rw,sync,umask=000 0 0

What's going on? It seems there are two copies of the same file hanging around!

Thoughts and solutions greatly appreiated.

Regards,
Dinesh

Steel_J · 12-30-2005, 05:56 PM

This is the FSTAB entry I use for my external USB 2.0 Drive.

It is formated as fat32 and I can both use, see from, mofify files on it from XP or Linux.

It should be the same for an internal IDE drive:

Code:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/removable vfat    pamconsole,exec,noauto,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,managed 0 0

Hope this helps!

dineshshah · 01-03-2006, 08:13 PM

Thanks for the suggestion. I was hopeful but the change had no affect (it also didn't understand pamconsole).

I'm starting to wonder if it's something perculier to my disk / partition rather than a general problem since I've found only one other posting with the same problem.

One thing I did try was to format the partition from Linux (it had previously been formatted from WindowsXP) with mkdosfs -F 32. This had the effect of making a file created in Linux visible in XP but not openable (it complains of a corrupt file.