Re: Is there a way to limit VFAT allocation?

[Grzegorz Kulewski <kangur@polcom.net>]

Hi,

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006, Zoltan Boszormenyi wrote:
> I have bought a 2GB MP3 player / flash disk
> that erroneously partitions and formats its storage.
> The built-in firmware has an off-by-one bug that
> creates the partition one cylinder larger that the
> disk size allows and then it formats the VFAT fs
> according to the buggy partition size. No wonder
> when I try to copy large amounts of data to the
> flash disk it detects errors and then remounts it
> read-only.
>
> I tried to repartition and reformat it three times
> with different mformat or mkdosfs options
> but as soon as I remove it from the USB port,
> the device detects changed disk format and
> automatically reformats itself again, so it
> stays buggy.
[snip]
> Unfortunately, the firmware is not upgradeable.
> The device in question is a Telstar UFM-102B.
>
> Is there a way to tell the VFAT driver to exclude
> the last N sectors from the allocation strategy?

Maybe try to setup device mapper linear mapping backed by portion of that 
partition that is ok (== one cylinder smaller) instead of messing with 
filesystem drivers. And then create filesystem on top of that new device.


Grzegorz Kulewski