Re: [PATCH] try to avoid false positives on FAT filesystem

[Felix Zielcke <fzielcke@z-51.de>]

Am Freitag, den 06.02.2009, 07:07 +0100 schrieb phcoder:
> If I understood you correctly you propose to use partition table 
> information to determine filesystem. I'm personally against it. First of 
> all it isn't portable - it probably wouldn't work on GPT. Second if you 
> just do mkfs.* <device> the partition type isn't changed. Linux ignores 
> partition type and so if your patch is applied there will be many bug 
> reports like "hey, *FS isn't detected". Finally sometimes you 
> intentionally change partition type in the technics like partition 
> hiding. IMO the correct solution to this problem is to make sure that 
> fat and ntfs are probed at last. Should we add a priority field for this?
No I don't want to check the partition type.
FAT partitions normally have the string FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 at the
beginning of 512 bytes of the partition. But these DELL FAT partions
have there the string .AT16 so it would be a solution for the Debian bug
report we got.
But yes the best would be to probe for FAT at last but I don't know how
to change the order, in fs.lst FAT is listed after ext2 but it seems
that FAT is checked before ext2.

-- 
Felix Zielcke