From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Sep 18 22:06:31 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id WAA10958 for questions-outgoing; Thu, 18 Sep 1997 22:06:31 -0700 (PDT) Received: from houseofduck.ml.org (geo-160.remote.dti.net [206.252.145.160]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id WAA10943 for ; Thu, 18 Sep 1997 22:06:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from lazy.org (localhost.ml.org [127.0.0.1]) by houseofduck.ml.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id BAA00455; Thu, 18 Sep 1997 01:07:40 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <3420B71B.415273F1@lazy.org> Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 01:07:39 -0400 From: Joshua Fielden Reply-To: jfielden@geocities.com Organization: GeoCities X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.02b7 [en] (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-970903-RELENG i386) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Greg Lehey CC: Doug Lo , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Warning message, what does it mean? References: <3421E6FC.3C97F979@ms11.hinet.net> <19970919134926.56921@lemis.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Greg Lehey wrote: > > On Fri, Sep 19, 1997 at 10:44:12AM +0800, Doug Lo wrote: > > Hi, > > > > When I boot FreeBSD, I got a warning message as below: > > > > mountmsdosfs(): Warning: root directory is not a multiple of the > > clustersize in length. > > > > Would anyone tell me what it means? > > Well, the immediate meaning is obvious. > > > Should I notice it? > > Bearing in mind the flaky condition of msdosfs, I'd be very careful. > I don't know if things have improved, since I don't use Microsoft, but > there were times when anomalies in the file system structure could > cause msdosfs to overwrite not only its own partition, but also > neighbouring ones. If you must mount the file system, do it > read-only, at least until somebody more knowledgeable than I tells you > that the coast is clear. > > Greg I got this after I used "FIPS" to shrink a DOS partition to install BSD. It's got to ddo with the trick of fooling the drive into shrinking the partition but not recalculating clusters. If you used Partition Magic, FIPS, etc to shrink a DOS partition, I wouldn't worry too much. -- This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. If this had been an actual life-threatening emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed. -- Joshua Fielden, Systems Administrator, GeoCities http://www.geocities.com jfielden@geocities.com