Re: Strange FAT32 resize problem

[Andrew Clausen]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 09:47:25PM -0600, Dimitri Butvinik wrote:
> Andrew,
> Attached are 4 files - 4k files are from /dev/hda1 and 128k files are
> first 256 sectors from /dev/hda just in case you want to look at mbr or
> boot record.

I finally got a chance to take a good look at it.

There isn't actually much difference at all.

The only significant one is related to the way Parted resizes
FAT partitions.  It avoids realigning clusters (i.e. shifting them
ALL left or right a small amount) by setting the reserved field to
compensate.  In your case, it is particularly high (82, compared to
cluster size 32)

The other differences are:
 * FAT sizes are different (a consequence of the above difference)
 * FS label different (odd!)
 * some things in the info sector different (irrelevant) [i.e. free
 cluster count and next free cluster]  (also, a consequence of above
 difference)

In any case, Parted's reserved field seems higher than it needs to be.
Perhaps if it were lower, then there would be no problem.  (Or it
might indicate another bug in the computations... but I doubt this
is the case because they look otherwise sane at first glance, and XP
is read/writing them OK).

But I still don't have a clue why you can't boot.  Do you have any idea
how far the boot process gets?  At this point, I'd be debugging it.

Thanks,
Andrew