[nflug] fsck versus chkdsk

[Cyber Source]

wpos2 at adelphia.net wrote:
> This is the beginning of the new thread I promised several minutes ago.
>
> In the computer lab, people often come in with floppy disks.  (I just 
> realized that this may be a soultion to the rebooting problem in favor 
> of thumb drives.  But read on.)  The problem I'm talking about seems 
> to happen consistently with floppies whose origin is from a Windows 9x 
> machine (some of which are still on campus).  They put the floppy in 
> the Lab machine (which runs Windows XP), and I don't remember off hand 
> if they're able to read the floppy at this point.  Anyway, at some 
> point between inserting the floppy and trying to save a file 
> (preexisting or otherwise), the floppy craps out. Chkdsking will 
> usually result in something like "Read 0 bytes at sector x," and at 
> this point it doesn't seem that anything can be done with XP. (I never 
> use the GUI chkdsk, because it never gives a report of what it 
> found.)  Parenthetically, there used to be a 98 machine at the Lab, 
> and running a thorough scandisk (after several minutes) seems to put 
> things in order.  I know that XP is not quite the avatar of backwards 
> compatibility, and the scuttlebut is that XP writes floppy FATs 
> differently than 9x, and mixing one FAT writing process with another 
> scrambles it.
>
> I usually have my dual-boot laptop with me at work.  (Guess which OS I 
> boot into regularly.)  Fscking here usually results with something 
> like "read x bytes instead of y bytes at sector z."  However, I am 
> able to mount the floppy (after a "input/output error message) enough 
> to copy the contents to a thumb drive.  (My machine doesn't reboot 
> spontaneously like the others, but I digress.)  Then I'm able to 
> reformat the floppy under XP, CAREFULLY insert the thumb drive into 
> that machine, copy the disk's former contents, and we're in business 
> again.
>
> So, finally, here's my question: are there any Linux commands or 
> utilities that are more effective in this case than fsck.vfat?  I 
> usually use the parameters afltvVw, but it seems that any parameters 
> that I use (including no parameters) have the exact same result, 
> except of course for v.  For quick reference:
> usage: fsck.vfat [-aAflrtvVwy] [-d path -d ...] [-u path -u ...]
>                device
>   -a       automatically repair the file system
>   -A       toggle Atari file system format
>   -d path  drop that file
>   -f       salvage unused chains to files
>   -l       list path names
>   -r       interactively repair the file system
>   -t       test for bad clusters
>   -u path  try to undelete that (non-directory) file
>   -v       verbose mode
>   -V       perform a verification pass
>   -w       write changes to disk immediately
>   -y       same as -a, for compat with other *fsck
>
> I suppose I've found a solution in copying the floppy contents back 
> after reformatting, but I'm just miffed that a relatively proprietary 
> dinosaur can do what Linux can't.  Or is this a symptom of Trade 
> Secret Syndrome?
>
> Any insight will at least give me peace of mind, for which I will be 
> grateful.
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I would like to see some response to this thread because I have NEVER 
had any luck with floppies in Linux. I mean I have used them yes but 
they have ALWAYS been troublesome, cross platform or not. If anyone has 
some insight into easy floppy management in Linux that just plain works, 
I'm all ears. Not that it's really a big deal anymore but I do have a 
few clients out there with their sony digital cams that write to the 
floppies, etc..
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