[SOLVED] Re: OT: corrupted FATs on an external drive

peter kostov fedora at light-bg.com
Sun Apr 1 18:41:36 UTC 2007


Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> peter kostov wrote:
>   
>> Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
>>     
>>> peter kostov wrote:
>>>  
>>>       
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I have a Samsung mp3 player that doesn't want to format his drive.
>>>> When I run fsck on it I get:
>>>>
>>>> # fsck.vfat -rtlV -v /dev/sdb1
>>>> dosfsck 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)
>>>> dosfsck 2.11, 12 Mar 2005, FAT32, LFN
>>>> Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem
>>>> Boot sector contents:
>>>> System ID "MSDOS5.0"
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> <-----------------[ snip ]----------------->
>>>  
>>>       
>>>> I have tried mkdosfs with no luck.
>>>> I will appreciate very much if anyone can tell mi what to do to get it
>>>> back to work.
>>>>
>>>> Peter
>>>>
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> What kind of error did you get with mkdosfs? Did you remember to
>>> specify that you wanted a FAT32 file system? (-F 32).
>>>
>>> Mikkel
>>>   
>>>       
>> Thanks Mikkel, but there wasn't an error. There wasn't any effect also.
>> I have tried several times with -F 16, because fsck reported:
>> First FAT starts at byte 512 (sector 1)
>>        2 FATs, 16 bit entries
>> Then I have tried with -F 32, again with no success. As I sad mkdosfs
>> didn't report any error, however in dmesg I saw several resets of the
>> device during the mkdosfs process. After that when I remount the player
>> all the files are still there, and the player itself again doesn't see
>> them.
>> Peter
>>
>>     
> It almost looks like the device is write-protecting its file system.
> But it could be from other causes. A couple of things to keep in
> mind. You should not run mkdosfs with the drive mounted. From the
> dosfsck output, the system thinks it is a FAT32 file system. You may
> want to run "fdisk -l /dev/sdb" to double check the partition type.
>
> Dumb question - are you running mkdosfs on /dev/sdb1, and not
> /dev/sdb? Running it on /dev/sdb will produce strange results,
> including possible corruption of files on the device, possibly
> without messing up the directories...
>
> Mikkel
>   
I think the cause was the corrupted partition table ( from the mkdosfs 
output: 'Both FATs appear to be corrupt. Giving up.' )
I found a program called "YP-ST5 Updater" (windows executable from 
Samsung) that has overwritten the whole operating system of the player 
and the bootloader, firmware, etc. It has re-formated the filesystem, 
restored the FATs and now the player works fine.

P.S. the filesystem was not mounted and I have used mkdosfs on /dev/sdb1.

Thanks for helping anyway!

Best  regards,
Peter





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