can not mount a large FAT32 filesystem

[Arne Wörner]

> Might this be an attempt by the manufacturer to avoid the
> potential patent litigation from using msdosfs?  I.e.
> create a slightly non-conformant filesystem so that it
> can't claim to explicitely be msdosfs/vfat/fat32/whatever,
> thereby avoiding the patents on those technologies?
>
Then that software patent idea wouldn't make much sense, because:
It wants to protect the complicated "new" ideas and not things
"everybody" could do... Furthermore the FAT filesystem is most
likely (I never looked at it myself) quite primitive and based on
principles, that are quite old and well known in "administration
science" (directories, files, names, references, ...), so that
there is nothing "new"...

> Since these checks are done after other magic number checks,
> it's likely safe.
>
One message in this thread says, that M*cr*s*ft does not use that
values anyway (somehow that data field might be "reserved for
later use")... I do not know, why that data field was checked by
the FreeBSD code...

I say, is the content of that data field somewhere explained or
specified?

-Arne



		
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