Hi there

I have a shared FAT32 partition on my laptop hard drive on which I keep many files and documents. I boot almost exclusively in Linux (Suse 10.2) but occasionally have to use XP to run Macros and the like on Word documents for my job.
I booted in XP this week to run some Word document macros and now all of my OOo files on that partition have become 'Read-only'! Most have mild corruption (OOo can repair them, but the date formats on spreadsheets have all changed!).

I had a similar problem a couple of months ago and on that occasion XP seems to have tried to 'repair' the partition and badly corrupted much of the data on there. The corrupted files are NOT read only when opened in XP with Word, but then are when open in OOo.

I have copied the files back to my Home file and repaired them all, but what is going on? I can't even seem to change the permissions on my files on the shared partition to be able to write to them again.

Here is my Fstab file if it helps..



The Windows/D partition is the shared one.
thanks for listening...

For clarification, when you said they had become "read only", do you mean under XP or under Linux? MS products use flags on the FAT filesystem for this that, TMK, the Linux FAT driver doesn't have access to. Under Linux, all files/directories on the partition have the same ownership/permissions, which are determined at mount time. From your fstab it looks like both user and group should always have write permission.

This may be a bit of a long shot, but as far as the corruption goes I am wondering if it could be caused by the utf8 specification. Do you need that? If not, try eliminating it. (I picked that out because it is the only thing different from what I have used with FAT32.) The only other things I can think of are either hardware problems or problems on the XP side.

Good luck.

I have now switched to keeping all shared files on ext3 and using the ext2fsd driver for Windows---works great.

Thanks for the replies, and sorry for not getting back to you earlier as I've been away from my laptop for a day or two.

Blackhole54 - I mean 'read only' under Linux. I can't modify any of the files any more. Under XP, they are fine. Windows seems to have gained permission for my files!!
I have no idea about the utf8 specification. I don't know why its there or what it does. Any ideas/info welcome! Do I need this?

pixellany - I have never heard of ext2fsd under Windows. I'll do some research and perhaps try that. It sound sa good idea.

That is really strange. When this read-only condition exists, does ls show read-only or does {b]mount[/b] show the partition is mounted read-only? Pixellany's sugestion might turn out to be the easiest thing to resolve this.

I guess that means you didn't enter that line in fstab. I think it has something to do with encoding file names. As I said, you might try removing that one option and see if things clear up. I have never used it with FAT32, but then again the most recent MS system I've had installed is win95. I've never had any issues with Linux's access to FAT32.

Thanks for the help.
I rebooted today and now the files ARE accessible again!! Most odd.

I'll remove the utf8 bit anyway as it seems unnecessary. I'll also investigate ext2fsd as it sounds a better solution than the one I have now.

Thanks for the help.