Description of problem: I have a dual-boot Dell XPS M1710. I rebooted from WinXP Pro to F8 as usual. I have a large FAT32 shared drive (/dev/sda6) that is mounted as /data in Linux. I launched VMWare Player and it said that it could not open the files because the file system was read-only. I remounted it, and again, same error. Some Google-Fu revealed that I should check /var/log/messages (paraphrasing sorry): FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda6) fat_free_clusters: deleting FAT entry beyond EOF Filesystem has been set read-only. I rebooted and had Windows' chkdsk check it, and it ended up truncating a few files. I booted back to F8 and then instead of risking my VM machine going poof, went into a scratch directory and copied some code there. I was able to do "make" once, on the second run, again the filesystem went r/o with the same error in the main log. So went back to Windows, had it chkdsk again, fixed it, and then rebooted into 2.6.23.8-63. The scratch directory seemed OK for like 30 "make clean; sync; sync; sync; make; sync; sync; sync" iterations, and I had made a copy of the VM under Windows, so tried that. Everything seems rock solid again. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2.6.23.9-85.fc8 NOTE: 2.6.23.8-63.fc8 seems FINE How reproducible: Not really all that willing to keep risking; it's a work machine. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot into 2.6.23.9-85.fc8 from grub 2. Do a lot of disk activity on FAT32 drive 3. Actual results: File system corruption. Expected results: No file system corruption. Additional info: As far as I know, everything else was the same - the wireless was disabled, and no external USB/FireWire devices.
I'm surprised nobody has said anything about this. Anyway, it looks like it may have happened again today, this time under the previous kernel 2.6.23.8-63.fc8. I have been safely using that for a week, but now all the files I had edited are saying "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable." It looks like I've now lost a full days work. This cannot be good.
Well, http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.23.14 looked promising. It seemed to work for most of the day. But then the weirdest thing happened when I rebooted into WinXP. I was editing a bunch of source files that are under svn control. When I booted back to Windows, it was able to read the files fine, but they were the OLD files from before I had rebooted! svn said the files had no changes; I made sure to have it cleanup and rescan the files. I rebooted thinking maybe I was working in another directory. No, under Linux "svn diff" showed my changes. So I rebooted again and forced a chkdsk. Now the Windows side sees the new files, and the recovered lost chains are all the original files. So I am guessing that the two sides aren't looking at the same FAT tables or something???
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