Gecko/20110303 Thunderbird/3.1.9   
   UTC)   
   comp.os.os2.utilities:113   
   From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard    
      
   >> It's not finished, yet. Yes, it will format and check FAT volumes.   
   >>   
   > BTW, does 'check' including fixing FAT32 ?   
   >   
      
   Aside from the part that deals with the FATs themselves, the checking    
   code is bitness-agnostic.  So it should work the same on all bitnesses.   
      
   > The current FAT32 check often leads to a msg like: Please run u$    
   > Scandisk to fix your partition :-/   
   >   
      
   Not knowing what error causes that, or even what the real message is    
   (which what you write clearly is not), I cannot address specifics.  The    
   checker recognizes the errors that I know how to recognize, and    
   automatically fixes the ones that I know how to automatically fix.     
   There's a whole repair policy section of the reference manual    
   documenting what errors are recognized and fixed.  It's fairly long.   
      
   In general, the target problem is metadata corruption errors, and things    
   that IBM's CHKDSK cannot handle at all such as orphaned long filenames,    
   erroneously lowercased 8.3 names, and dot entries in the root    
   directory.  (CHKDSK enters an infinite loop on that latter.)  Physical    
   I/O problems reading/writing the medium are an entirely different kettle    
   of fish, and not the target problem.   
      
   >> But I'd like to have HPFS support as well. That's mostly just a    
   >> placeholder at the moment.   
   >>   
   > Well, for first test version, we will all be quite happy with only    
   > FAT32 :-)   
   > Anyway, current HPFS formatting is dead slow, so a better version    
   > would surely be nice.   
   >   
      
   It may be that that's as fast as it is possible to format an HPFS    
   volume.  I don't remember it being particularly slow.  (It has been a    
   long time since I had to format an HPFS volume.)  I don't know how much    
   has to be done to high-level format an HPFS volume, since I haven't    
   written the code to do that, yet.  It's probably a little more than to    
   high-level format a FAT volume (which pretty much only involves writing    
   3 things: a BPB, the FATs, and the root directory).  There are a few    
   more data structures to write with HPFS, and they are a little more    
   evenly spread throughout a volume.  But off the top of my head I cannot    
   think of a reason why high-level formatting FAT and HPFS should be    
   greatly different from each other as far as execution times are    
   concerned.  From what I remember when, years ago, I last formatted HPFS    
   disc volumes, they weren't.   
      
      
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