Baslinux mailing list

["Ian Scott" <mriscott AT yahoo.co.uk>]

> So what is expected to happen if I try with Bl3 to mount a fat32
partition?  Might > this have messed up my fat32 partition?

Nope - mounting a partition won't reformat it.  If you want to be really
paranoid, mount readonly with -ro option, then you won't be able to write to
it at all.

>People keep telling me different things.  FAT32 is for 2G or larger drives
and 
>FAT16, they say, can handle long file names (with freedos or msdos 7). 
>Is this wrong?  In any event, I think I should keep fat32 and long file
names off 
>my DOS/linux computers to avoid problems.  I can copy truncated linux files
to DOS 
>once in a while instead of ~1 names.  Easier to type.

The difference between FAT16 and FAT32 is AFAIK just to do with the size of
clusters I believe. See http://www.activewin.com/faq/faq_2.shtml

The long filenames is something else.  DOS (FAT16/FAT32) filesystems really
only support 8.3 filenames, but there is some clever hidden stuff which does
the translations.   If you have a win9x system, and boot to DOS you will see
the 8.3 filenames.  See http://pclt.cis.yale.edu/pclt/BOOT/VFAT.htm.  Note
that if you rename the 8.3 versions of files, you will lose the long
filename information.