Iomega USB external hard drive

[Kay Sievers]

On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 11:10:52AM -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I think that the problem here is that the software that you used for
> formatting the partitions has a bug - specifically, the problem is that
> the file system signatures for ext3 start at offset 0x400 while it
> starts at offset 0 for FAT. Thus, on a ext3 filesystem you may have what
> looks as a valid vfat signature and the bug is that the software you
> used for formatting the ext3 file system should have cleared the first
> 0x400 bytes but it didn't. You may do that manually yourself though.
> 
> I'm not sure how to best approach this problem, maybe we should probe
> for ext3 (and other fs'es where the super block isn't at offset 0)
> before vfat? I just remember a whole lot of problems when we did that
> and I think we changed it for a reason. What do you think Kay?

We changed it cause it slowed down probing on very slow devices. I still
see it as a serious bug in the formatting software. We have the same
problem with mkswap by the way, but the main(enter)tainer says it is
a feature to be able to recover data after a wrong use of mkswap and
denied to change it. If you run mkswap on a fat volume, you can even
mount the now corrupted disk.
We should file bugs against all broken mkfs stuff. I don't see
how we can solve that with HAL, if we change the order now, other users
will have the same problem the other way around...
Any better idea?

Kay
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