Lost files on SCSI magnetooptical drive

pwabrahams · 01-15-2007, 08:38 AM

I have a Fujitsu 2.3GB magneto-optical drive. I'm running OpenSuSE 10.2. The drive is unpartitioned, so it looks like a single partition to Linux (and Windows). It is formatted as VFAT. Until recently it was behaving as expected; I could put files on it and read them later.

But recently (I'm not sure exactly when), all the files disappeared. I can still mount the drive and look at its contents. In fact, I can put new files on it and they remain visible and retrievable.

Here's the really strange part. This is a dual-boot machine. Under Windows all the old files on the drive are still visible -- along with the new ones that I put on the drive with Linux. I even put some additional files on the drive under Windows, but those aren't visible under Linux either. The files I put on under Linux are visible under Windows, however. Two questions, then:

1. What's going on? Why are some files visible under Windows but not under Linux?

2. Is there a way to make the old files visible under Linux?

The fstab entry for the drive is:

/dev/sda /magopt vfat user,iocharset=iso8859-1,users,rw,umask=0 0 0

budgie9 · 01-15-2007, 10:26 PM

My drive did the same as you are seeing. However it is not the same drive but an older optical drive being 230 Mb, and is now used in my backup computer.
What I did to resolve the problem was to backup the data in Windoze, then reformated the 18 disks as fat32. It seems to me that Linux is not happy with opticals formatted to Vfat. I could be wrong but decided to reformt just in case I lost the lot.

Since doing so I can read the disks in both Linux and Windoze. I am not sure of this will help you, but worth a try?

pwabrahams · 01-16-2007, 01:18 PM

The Linux mount program doesn't recognize FAT32, only VFAT. Windows recognizes only FAT32, not VFAT. I tried reformatting under Windows and recopying the files, but the files still aren't visible under Linux using VFAT, and there's nothing else I can see using. I think that VFAT is just the Linux name for FAT32.

Until recently all of this worked fine. There's been some system change that screwed things up.

I tried reformatting the drive under Linux and that just made it unreadable under Linux. It was still readable under Windows.

My next step, I suppose, is to turn the unpartitioned drive into one big partition and see if that helps.

fakie_flip · 03-04-2007, 04:35 PM

What's the difference between vfat and fat32? To me it sounds like vfat is more general and includes fat12, fat16 and fat32, but I could be wrong. I think the command mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/hda1 creates a fat32 partition. Here is an excerpt from the mkfs.vfat man page.

Code:

       -F FAT-size
              Specifies  the type of file allocation tables used (12, 16 or 32
              bit).  If  nothing  is  specified,  mkdosfs  will  automatically
              select  between  12  and  16  bit,  whatever fits better for the
              filesystem size.  32 bit FAT  (FAT32  format)  must  (still)  be
              selected explicitly if you want it.