Re: very large FAT16 partition not readable on 2.6.0-test11

[Andries Brouwer <aebr@win.tue.nl>]

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 03:03:33PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:

> I just bought a new USB/Firewire external drive.  It comes pre-formatted
> as FAT16 (or so shows fdisk) as one big 80Gb partition.  Unfortunately,
> Linux can't seem to mount this partition, and I get the following dmesg
> output when trying to mount the partition:
> 	FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
> 	VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sdb1.
> 
> Now before I blow it away and put a sane filesystem on this disk, I
> saved off the MBR and the initial portion of the partitions if anyone
> wants to poke around and take a look at it.  I'll keep the filesystem
> as-is for a few days if anyone wants me to get any more data from it.

Good.

* fat16_sdb1: this is all zeros. No filesystem at all, which explains
  why it won't mount.
* fat16_mbr: nothing wrong here

   Device Boot    Start       End   #sectors  Id  System
fat16_mbr1            63 156360644  156360582   6  FAT16
fat16_mbr2             0         -          0   0  Empty
fat16_mbr3             0         -          0   0  Empty
fat16_mbr4             0         -          0   0  Empty

* fat16_sdb:
There is a little bit of data here - don't know what it is.

Andries