Corrupted FAT32 writing with FC3

[Mike McCarty]

Alex Janssen wrote:
> Hello,
> I've set up my laptop to dual boot Windos XP Home and Fedora Core 3.  
> The drive is partitioned with ntfs, fat32 and ext3.  I have Mozilla 
> Thunderbird on Win and Linux setup to use the same files.  This seems to 
> work fine most  of the time.  But, whenever I compact the t-bird files 
> from the Linux side, Windows reports that the Thunderbird directories 
> or  files are corrupt and unreadable.  I don't know if this is a problem 
> with Thunderbird(unlikely), Linux, Windows or the drive itself.  I have 
> run a disk sector scan from windows yielding no errors.  Usually, the 
> newly created mail files are crosslinked with another file. I've Googled 
> a bunch of stuff and found nothing specific to FC3.  Has anyone else had 
> any problems like this?
> 
> I'm buffaloed.
> Alex
> 

Well, the first thing is to get a plan of attack.

You might try creating a small partition and setting Thunderbird
to use it from both Windows and Linux. Use dd to create a copy
which could be "reloaded". Next, you could compact the mail
folder from Windows, and use dd again to save it off. Reload,
and compact again using Linux. If you get cross-linked files,
then at least you've got something *small* and repeatable
(well, hopefully repeatable), and some way to compare the output.

As a first step, what does fsck have to say when Windows complains
that there are cross-linked files? What does scandisk say?

I'm afraid that in cases like this, it is very difficult to make
much progress without a lot of work.

Mike
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