[CentOS] Can't mount FAT32 partition

Mon Aug 29 17:32:31 UTC 2005
Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com>

On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 02:08 +0900, Dave Gutteridge wrote:
> >/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat rw,noauto,user,uid=512,gid=1002 1 2
> >                                                            ^ ^
> >really really bad idea -------------------------------------|-|
> >  
> >
> If you say so. Did I mention I was a newbie? I'm a newbie. I only put in 
> the 1 and 2 because that's what another guy on this list told me to do. 
> I have no idea what they mean.
> 
> >filesystem does not need to be dumped (field 5) and not need fsck'ing
> >(field 6) - it is vfat right?
> >
> If vfat is the same as fat32, then yes.
> 
> I'm a little scared to go ahead with this, because I don't want to lose 
> any more data. If I change the last two numbers, will I at least be safe 
> from having Linux try and make changes to the hard drive?
----
Well you are asking something that I have never tried (and clearly won't
at this stage) but I would have expected that the fsck subroutine should
have recognized that it was a vfat partition and simply aborted rather
than try to repair it - but evidently, it was trying to be helpful and
repair the damaged filesystem. ;-)

I apologize for whomever told you to put the '1 2' for the fifth/sixth
fields in fstab for a vfat partition. That probably wasn't a very good
idea.

As for being scared...you are mounting as rw which means read/write. You
could mount ro (read only) but of course, then you couldn't write stuff
to it.

Craig