VFAT problems in 2.4.14

[Alex Walker <alex@x3ja.co.uk>]

[Please CC me in any replies - I am not subscribed to the list]

I was copying some files from a reiserfs partition to a FAT32 partition
with the simple command `sudo cp -a Docs/mywork My\ Documents\Work`.
Where "My\ Documents" is a symlink to a directory on my windows
partition.  I did this as sudo since I had no set up permissions on my
FAT32 partition for my normal user.  I then rebooted into Windows, only
to discover that it had gone badly wrong.

The original directory had only 3 subdirectories.  2 of these
transferred across without any errors.  The final one was created, but
the contents corrupted.  It originally had 1.4M of data in 6 document
files.  Instead of these files, files and directories with spurious
names (lots of symbols I can't type in my editor) were created.

Not only this, but the contents of this directory claimed to total 74G
(on a 20G disk!).  None of the files were readable in Windows.

I rebooted again into linux and investigated some more.
- The files names were all 12 characters long. 
- There are 72 of these files.
- When listing the directories you get "Directory sread (sector
  0xd12a66d, limit 6136798" "attempt to access beyond end of device"
  errrors.
- Again, linux thinks the directory is 72G big (but df disagrees on
  partition size)
- Even though the partition is mounted read-only, any attempt to re-copy
  is met with a "creating `file`: Read-only file system" error

Fortunately it was a copy, not a move!

Hope this is helpful.  Any advice appreciated.

aLeX

-- 
-----------------------------
Alex Walker   alex@x3ja.co.uk 
        x3ja|alex
-----------------------------