You may thinking that this will change the on-disk format of fat
partitions. That is not true. This change only fixes the linux fat
implementation to allow working with larger partitions. Those 28bits I
mentioned here have nothing to do with FAT table entries that you are
talking about.
At 06:48 PM 1/3/2002 -0800, CJ wrote:
>FAT32 stores 28 bit cluster numbers. You need to increase cluster size
>instead of the 28 bits to stay FAT32. The spec is fatgen102.pdf:, I'll
>mail it to you.
>
>Hardware White Paper Hardware White Paper
>FAT: General Overview of On-Disk Format
>Version 1.02, May 5, 1999
>Microsoft Corporation
>
>Vijay Kumar wrote:
>
>>Alan,
>>
>>This is regarding a change I had to make to the kernel 2.2.17-14 to
>>support really large drives. In our project we deal with huge drives,
>>sometimes drives larger than 128GB. The file system is FAT32 and only one
>>partition is create on any drive. During our testing we realized that
>>linux fat implementation doesn't support partitions larger than
>>128GB(actually 64GB because of a bug in fat implementation).
>>
>>This limitation is imposed by the data structures used by the linux fat
>>implementation to read/write directory entries. A 'long' data type is
>>used to access directory entries on the disk, of which only 28 bits are
>>used to identify the sector that contains the directory entry and the
>>rest 4 bits are used to specify offset of the directory entry inside the
>>sector. Using 28 bits to identify a sector means we cannot access sectors
>>beyond 128GB (2^28*512), thus limiting us from creating partitions larger
>>than 128GB on large disk drives.
>>
>>I have made changes to fat, vfat and msdos file system implementations in
>>the kernel to use larger data types, thus allowing us to create larger
>>partitions. As per the GPL I would like to make the patch available to
>>everyone and also in case somebody has run into the same problem(who
>>cares about fat in the linux world). The patch has been fairly well
>>tested only on our systems(p3, 700MHz with FC). I truly appreciate if you
>>& anybody in the kernel mailing list have any feedback about the changes.
>>
>>The patch is applicable to only 2.2.17-14 kernel and may require changes
>>to use with other kernel versions. As far as I know none of the kernel
>>versions provide any fix for this problem.
>>
>>Thanks,
>>- Vijay
>
>
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jan 07 2002 - 21:00:27 EST