[CentOS] Can't mount FAT32 partition

[Dave Gutteridge]

Whoah! Totally scary and not good.
I tried this:

>/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat rw,noauto,user,uid=512,gid=1002 1 2
>  
>
And then I tried "mount -a". It returned not errors, so figured it 
worked. I went to the Nautilus file browser, and saw that the 30 GB 
FAT32 HD had an icon. I clicked to open it, but it gave an error similar 
to before.

I figured I'd reboot, to make sure that the whole system was caught up 
on the new settings.

But...

When I rebooted, somewhere alon the way, it started saying things like 
"file XXX is nnnn bytes, truncating to n2n2n2n2 bytes..."
It was going through my FAT32 HD and truncating files!

What is up with that?

Not knowing what else to do, I hard reset the machine. I rebooted into 
Windows, and sure enough some files on the FAT32 disk were corrupted.

So then I had to boot back into CentOS without it messing with my files. 
After some trial and error, I found that if I booted with the rghb quiet 
option off, I could hit ctrl+C and stop it from truncating too many 
files (but still some!).

This is totally undesirable. I have data on that hard drive I can't 
afford to lose. I want to access it with CentOS, not destroy it.

What's going on?

Dave