capitalization of filenames on FAT partition
 

I'm trying to remaster the contents of a data CD I once produced on Windows. The contents were copied off a couple of defective old discs to make one good replica on my local drive. This drive is a shared FAT32 partition on a dual-boot system. In Konqueror, there is a folder which reads as 'cd2004', though under Windows or when reading it off the original disc in Konqueror it displays capitalized as 'CD2004'. I discovered a problem using this disc when switching to Linux, because some problems with capitalization meant navigating its HTML page contents via links failed, despite it always being fine on Windows machines (and as far as I know, Macs too).

Konqueror refuses to let me change the name of this folder to CD2004. However, on my Linux ext3 home partition, I can easily create a folder with the same name and change the capitalization as I wish. I tried unchecking the read-only status showing under Windows, but back in Linux all folders just show with the default FAT permissions of drwxr-xr-x. The permissions on this partition under Linux show as my username as the owner, and 'root' as the group. I think I tried to change the group to 'users' once a long time ago whilst logged in as root, but it wouldn't let me, claiming that even I as root didn't have access.

I'm a bit baffled here. I want to ensure that when I burn the disc again it will work under any OS. But to do this I need to know for sure whether to link other files to the folder cd2004 or CD2004. I've also noticed that when I create new folders on this partition, named such as 'V1_1_06' Konqueror instantly changed the first V to a v, yet if I rename it by adding a few more digits at the end, (say 'V1_1_060121') it allows the capital V.
:confused:

Try mounting the partition with the option shortname=mixed, since the default for vfat is shortname=lower ("shortname"s being filenames within 8 characters (plus 3 for the file extension).)

Re: capitalization of filenames on FAT partition
 

Thanks, I'll give it a go. I presume I can do this in fstab? If so, my current line reads:

/dev/hda9 /data1 vfat defaults,user,uid=<username> 1 2

So is it right to amend it as follows?

/dev/hda9 /data1 vfat defaults,user,uid=<username>,shortname=mixed 1 2

Would doing this have any impact on my existing data on that drive?

Yeah, that looks good!
As far as I know, it won't change what's already in the FAT or not. So, depends on how it was copied over to if that info will already be there or not? (Not sure how that stuff works.) It shouldn't hurt anything anyway.

Problem now solved.

Cheers!