Is it safe to write to a vfat32 partition?

[Rick Stevens]

On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 11:56 -0700, George Arseneault wrote:
> I have an HP-Pavilion with a 40GB main drive which has
> Windows on it and a 8GB secondary drive on which I
> mounted FC5.  Needless to say, I'd rather have MP3's,
> jpeg's and such on the big drive. 
> 
> I've got it set up so I can mount the Win drive
> read-only. Since, I believe I read it somewhere, that
> writing to a VFat partition can sometimes cause
> errors.
> 
> Is this true?

Only if you lose power to the drive while the write is happening as
VFAT has no journal.

Other than that, writing to a VFAT or FAT16/24/32 filesystem is quite
safe.  The Windows-based FS you WILL have issues with is NTFS.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-           "I understand Windows 2000 has a Y2K problem."           -
----------------------------------------------------------------------