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Problems with FAT32 sharing beetween OSX and XP


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Hi *

 

I have laptop (HP NC6210) with dual boot WinXP and 10.4.7

I want to setup FAT32 partition as common for both system data partition.

 

Well - now strange things (for me well known issues form old OS/2 days) starts to appear:

every touch of FAT32 partition by WinXP leaves this partition in state where 10.4.7 touch cause data corruption. Only running OSX chkdsk before use allow to use this partition after XP use.

 

Observations are as following:

1. Running CHKDSK on this partition and next using exclusively with XP or OSX - all is OK

2. Use first under OSX and next XP - all also OK

3. Use under XP and next under OSX cause data corruption.

 

So conclusion is clear: when XP is touching partition - leaves it in state in which OSX can damage it.

I belive it is last, new MS "improvement" because I don't belive that in the past were here so basic FAT32 problems beetween OSX and XP.

 

OSX chkdsk show following:

 

-OSX chkdsk before XP touch:

Verifying volume “DATA”

** /dev/disk0s5

** Phase 1 - Read FAT

** Phase 2 - Check Cluster Chains

** Phase 3 - Checking Directories

** Phase 4 - Checking for Lost Files

49025 files, 2665744 free (333218 clusters)

Mounting Disk

1 non HFS volume checked

Volume passed verification

 

-OSX chkdsk after XP touch:

Verifying volume “DATA”

** /dev/disk0s5

** Phase 1 - Read FAT

** Phase 2 - Check Cluster Chains

** Phase 3 - Checking Directories

** Phase 4 - Checking for Lost Files

Next free cluster in FSInfo block (15922) not free

fix? no

49025 files, 2665744 free (333218 clusters)

Mounting Disk

1 non HFS volume checked

Volume passed verification

 

Maybe I should use old versions of XP FAT32 driver ?

Maybe somebody has similar problems ?

 

thx in advance

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I dont understand what your problem is? After Windows uses the partition, all the files are corrupt?

 

Right,

 

Examle sequence is following:

-use partition under XP

-boot OSX and copy/move in/out some files

-osx chkdsk shows then:

 

Verifying volume “DATA”

** /dev/disk0s5

** Phase 1 - Read FAT

** Phase 2 - Check Cluster Chains

** Phase 3 - Checking Directories

/Private/.. starts with cluster marked as EOF

Remove? no

** Phase 4 - Checking for Lost Files

Next free cluster in FSInfo block (11547) not free

fix? no

36980 files, 3590224 free (448778 clusters)

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

 

 

1 non HFS volume checked

Volume needs repair

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I belive it is last, new MS "improvement" because I don't belive that in the past were here so basic FAT32 problems beetween OSX and XP.

 

What updated have you installed recently to claim that? I'm very annoyed by your allegations because you have not even posted how you formated you FAT32 partition and which OS or application you used to format it.

 

I have the most recent updates for XP and i use a 15gig partition to store torrents, linux dls, win dls, os x dls, My documents, videos, music, vmware images. Basically every file I edit for cross platform is in FAT32. I don't have the same problems as you and no other person on this forum can replicate your problem.

 

Please do what I posted on the other thread and see if it happens again.

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What updated have you installed recently to claim that? I'm very annoyed by your allegations because you have not even posted how you formated you FAT32 partition and which OS or application you used to format it.

 

I have the most recent updates for XP and i use a 15gig partition to store torrents, linux dls, win dls, os x dls, My documents, videos, music, vmware images. Basically every file I edit for cross platform is in FAT32. I don't have the same problems as you and no other person on this forum can replicate your problem.

 

Please do what I posted on the other thread and see if it happens again.

 

"Whiping whole drive" isn't rocket science. This solution I can use without anybody's help :(

After playing extensivelly with DFsee (http://www.dfsee.com'>http://www.dfsee.com) I can tell that partition starts to have problems "Next free cluster in FSInfo block (15922) not free" after OSX access - not XP.

DFsee (http://www.dfsee.com) and XP reports no errors.

It looks line I need some specialistic help with FAT32.... ;)

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Yea, he played with fire and got burned. He moved some partitions around and the partition manager created a small partition in the biginning of the drive that OS X doesn't agree with. That isn't rocket science either :).

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"Next free cluster in FSInfo block (15922) not free" seems to be the extent of his problem.

 

He refuses to indicate what's being corrupted. And how.

 

Well,

After corruption OSX's chkdsk reports:

 

....................

** Phase 3 - Checking Directories

/Private/.. starts with cluster marked as EOF

Remove? no

** Phase 4 - Checking for Lost Files

Next free cluster in FSInfo block (11547) not free

fix? no

36980 files, 3590224 free (448778 clusters)

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

.....................

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You're not making it clear what you're talking about. Some stupid fsock error isnt "corruption". Corruption is when you mount a drive, all the files come out as garbage.

 

The way you keep saying it, the fact that fsock hiccups when mounting your fat32 partition means that the end of the world is taking place.

 

For all we know, you could have a faulty hard drive.

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Yea, he played with fire and got burned. He moved some partitions around and the partition manager created a small partition in the biginning of the drive that OS X doesn't agree with. That isn't rocket science either :).

 

Indeed I was playing with Partition Manager. Also indeed PM leaves small unused free space. For eliminating this issue I use GParted and delete all partitions (exept XP and OSX) and create new one for FAT32. In GParted I verify that all partition are filling sector space contiguously (without gaps).

Also I verified CHS/Geo values in partition table for this partition are OK. Will see what happens.

 

But what is interesting for me:

 

To my knowledge (from MS doc’s): Next_Free_Cluster in FSBlock_Info is a hint for the FAT driver. It indicates the cluster number at which the driver should start looking for free clusters. Because a FAT32 FAT is large, it can be rather time consuming if there are a lot of allocated clusters at the start of the FAT and the driver starts looking for a free cluster starting at cluster 2. Typically this value is set to the last cluster number that the driver allocated. If the value is 0xFFFFFFFF, then there is no hint and the driver should start looking at cluster 2. Any other value can be used, but should be checked first to make sure it is a valid cluster number for the volume.

 

I my case errant value of Next_Free_Cluster is entered by OSX driver. I'm wonder what is wrong on my HDD and in result causes errant OSX's FAT32 driver behavior (wrong calculations of Next_Free_Cluster).

DFsee reports no partition table & CHS/Geo errors, Win chkdsk also reports OK.

 

I understand that Next_Free_Cluster is used more for speeding-up look-up than for clusters allocation - so errant value should rather cause performance degradation - not wrong clusters allocations leading to partition metadata corruptions...

 

 

 

You're not making it clear what you're talking about. Some stupid fsock error isnt "corruption". Corruption is when you mount a drive, all the files come out as garbage.

 

The way you keep saying it, the fact that fsock hiccups when mounting your fat32 partition means that the end of the world is taking place.

 

For all we know, you could have a faulty hard drive.

 

Sure - some small errors in partition metadata aren’t problem - AT BEGINING.

After few hours of using such partition - XP freezes. Reboot, chkdsk and I lost few dirs.

For me it is sort of data corruption, but I agree - data loss is a better term here :P

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I'm pretty sure you didnt specify that your fat32 partition is a live windows xp volume. Any consideration that maybe you shouldnt be allowing OS X to work with a drive that's kinda important?

 

Create a bridge partition, or get macdisk.

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I'm pretty sure you didnt specify that your fat32 partition is a live windows xp volume. Any consideration that maybe you shouldnt be allowing OS X to work with a drive that's kinda important?

 

Create a bridge partition, or get macdisk.

 

May You elaborate little more about difference between "live windows partition" and bridge partition/macdisk

?

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I have a similar problem. im using a maxtor 160 gig pata drive. my setup is 3 partitions. one is ntfs around 100 gig for windows xp sp2 the next is 15 gig for osx86 and the final one is most recently created using partition magic as a 40 gig fat32 partition to share between the 2 OS's.

i tend to use OSX more often than windows but windows downloads torrents faster than mac i think and mac not being able to create multisession disks makes windows the better choice for downloading tv series which i prefer to store together.

at first after creating the fat32 partition and using only mac to download at slightly slower speeds i had no problems. over several days i downloaded and rebooted without hassle. one day i wanted to download a big iso and so decided to use windows as i can get speeds over 1mbit there compared to about 200 to at most 400kbs in mac. problems began.

maybe not next boot of xp but soon after i started to get errors reported by chkdisk on xp startup which was irritating. for a while everything still seemed ok barr the chckdsk speil at every start and life continued as normal but then i noticed some rar packed files i had on the fat32 partition were not extracting. first sign of real trouble. i tried a program to repair them which seemed happy but left the files unchanged and unusable. also at this time i started to have random reboots. which i hate and think is enough of a reason to reinstall.

at the time i was unsure how i had corrupted my windows install and wondered whether it was the windows ATI drivers for my x1600 xt silent asus card which were not installing properly due to a dot net installer not installing properly. so i loaded a fresh copy of windows over the existing NTFS partition and started using that. more problems arose here. having previously used darwin as my bootloader (as osx was the active partiton) i could no longer get into osx. xp had become the active partition again and i tried to use the chain0 method which worked on other installs but this time i get the menu and choose Mac OSX and i sit and stare at an unchanging black screen.

so now i only have windows. i installed macdrive6.14 to see if i could look at the osx partition but that changed nothing and was a big letdown. i might try to make the osx partiton active again but not until i have done backups of my downloads.

so my problem is not the exactly the same as the earlier posters because windows complains not osx but very similar.

what id like to do is just keep the partitions seperate and use macdrive to access my tv shows and other downloads.

i hope that i or some clever person can discover a fix for this as soon as possible.

thanks in advance for any help

one thing i forgot to mention is that xp still reboots. at first after install it didnt but after some time using that fat32 partition i guess errors are affecting xp again. during the writing of this post i had one reboot.

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  • 2 months later...
  • 1 month later...

yep i fixed it. i made osx active using diskpart in windows command shell and the darwin bootloader starts up first and offers me windows and osx. when i get into windows i can use macdrive to see alll drives and i dont use fat32 anymore as it corrupts too often.

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