[CLUE-Tech] Mounting FAT32 partition as /home

[Jim Ockers]

Hi Angelo,

Angelo Bertolli wrote:
> 
> > How about using UMSDOS filesystem maybe?
> 
> I'm not familiar with UMSDOS, can you explain it a little bit?  Can 
> Windows read it?

http://linux.voyager.hr/umsdos/

It is "kind of" like the long filenames on FAT that Windows 9x uses,
except with a much richer feature set and a map file in each directory.
Maybe you could think of it like the TRANS.TBL files for ISO9660
filesystems, where the short filename is mapped to a long filename
and maybe some file metadata.

You can overlay an entire unix filesystem on a FAT filesystem using
UMSDOS I think.  Hardlinks, symlinks, pipes, permissions, ownership, 
etc. are all supported.

If the map file gets out of sync with the actual contents of the
directory (like, say, you were using Windows and it deleted a file)
you could have problems.  The fsck/sync program tries to fix problems
like that.

Obviously you need the UMSDOS filesystem tools to be able to create
and use it; also you have to have the filesystem kernel module on
hand (or it's compiled in the kernel).  cat /proc/filesystems to check;
you could try 'modprobe umsdos' if it's compiled as a module.

You might want to try the UVFAT patches so that the long filenames
are the same between Windows & Linux.

Hope this helps,
Jim

PS I did try UMSDOS once a very long time ago.  It made my DOS
filesystem seem messy because of all the extra files it created to 
contain the map information.

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/