This does look strange

Polytropon freebsd at edvax.de
Tue May 15 09:27:41 UTC 2012


On Tue, 15 May 2012 11:11:44 +0200, Bernt Hansson wrote:
> Hello list
> 
> After a reinstall of winxp, yes I know but the games.

You like playing with obsoleted OS imitations, that's okay. :-)



> I have a fat32 slice/partition/postcard whatever it's called.

It should be called a slice, because slice refers to a "DOS
primary partition", and those are covered with a FAT or NTFS
file system directly (unlike BSD which puts partitions into
a slice to carry more than one file system).

But postcard is also okay. :-)



> Mocking me with:
> 
> testbox# fsck -y -t msdosfs /dev/ad4
> ** /dev/ad4
> Invalid signature in fsinfo block
> Fix? yes
> fsck: /dev/ad4: Floating point exception: 8
> testbox#

Very strage. You're not supposed to fsck /dev/ad4 I think,
but you should name the _slice_ where "Windows XP" is installed
on. That should be something like /dev/ad4s1 (if it's the
1st primary partition on that disk).

Furthermore, -t msdosfs looks strange. As far as I know, the
"newer" versions of "Windows" come with NTFS as the primary
file losing system, so -t ntfs should be worth a try.

The command should be something like that:

	# fsck -y -t ntfs /dev/ad4s1

or

	# fsck -y -t msdosfs /dev/ad4s1

if you have _not_ formatted the postcard using NTFS, but FAT
(which corresponds to msdosfs).



> Anyone know what to do, is there a msdosfs fsck?

Yes, it's a native tool called CHKDSK.EXE. :-)

Really: You should first use the native tools provided by
"Windows" to fix a problem that seems to be a "Windows"
problem. If everything fails, you can always relapse to
forensic tools running on FreeBSD, or simply load your
backup sets.

There's also emulators/mtools in the ports collection
which might contain tools useful in this situation.

If you've just accidentally tried to fsck the wrong device
file, just forget everything I mentioned and use the correct
one. However, I'm not fully sure if FreeBSD's fsck can be
used to _really_ perform file system checks on FAT or NTFS
partitions, erm postcards.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...


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