Releases · dosfstools/dosfstools

31 Jan 13:22

pali

697f769

dosfstools 4.2 Latest

Latest

fatlabel now accepts two new options. When given the -i or --volume-id option, fatlabel changes to an alternate mode where it displays or changes the volume serial number instead of the volume label. With the -r or --reset option, it will remove the label or (in the alternate mode) generate a new volume serial number.

The user prompting for interactive fsck has been overhauled. Now it will directly react to a pressed key without the user having to additionally press enter. The changed prompting is also consistently repeating the prompt when invalid input is given.

The legacy check whether it is running on Atari hardware when compiled for 68k in order to automatically switch to Atari mode is now disabled by default. It can be compiled in with the new configure switch --enable-atari-check.

Both mkfs and fsck now have a new option --variant=TYPE where TYPE can be standard or atari to explicitly select one of those variants rather than having to toggle between them with -A.

fsck, mkfs and fatlabel were fixed to process volume label correctly. Previously there were many issues during processing labels. Fixes issues are: leading byte 0xE5 of root label needs to be handled in special way, label cannot contain some special characters, label itself is stored according to the current DOS codepage which may be specified by a new --codepage option. fatlabel now reads volume label only from the root directory to be compatible with existing systems like MS-DOS 5.00, MS-DOS 6.22, MS-DOS 7.10, Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows 7, 8, 10 and also with the Linux mlabel from mtools project. fsck was extended to fix incorrect volume labels and ensure that volume label from the root directory is same as the volume label stored in boot sector. Old versions of dosfslabel read label only from the boot sector. So with all these changes fsck now ensures compatibility with both MS-DOS/Windows and old Linux/dosfslabel world.

fsck now allows spaces in the middle of SFNs. Previous behavior (when spaces are disallowed) can be achieved by a new option -S.

Both mkfs and fsck now have fixed Year 2038 Bug. mkfs may still set filesystem timestamp to 1980-01-01 00:00:00 (beginning of the FAT era) in case operating system has Year 2038 Bug and cannot provide current time in time_t variable.

Some memory leaks were fixed in fatlabel and fsck to make valgrind happy.

Processing of command line arguments in all tools were fixed to ensure that invalid options are not accepted anymore and proper error message is thrown instead of trying to continue with uninitialized or undefined value.

In fsck and fatlabel were fixed issues that faulty filesystems were able to trigger integer overflows during reading them.

mkfs now has a new option --offset for specifying offset at which filesystem would start. This is useful when formatting FAT filesystem on disk image with MBR table without need to use loopback kernel driver with partx to access only specific partition.

All tools now can be compiled without iconv library and in this case they support only CP850 codepage which is integrated into tools. This internal CP850 codepage can be used also when tools were compiled with iconv library which do not support CP850 (e.g. iconv from GNU libc without installed gconv shared libraries).

Manual pages were updated to clarify some ambiguous options and descriptions. fatlabel has a new section with details about volume label and codepage issues.

mkfs now has a new option --mbr which fills (fake) MBR table with one partition which spans whole disk device. This (fake) MBR table is needed only for non-removable disks used on Microsoft Windows systems and only when formatting whole unpartitioned disk.

mkfs now calculates CHS geometry according to the SD Card Part 2 File System Specification. For SD cards with more than 256MB capacity is this new CHS calculation same as CHS calculation defined for hard disks via LBA-Assist Translation. So CHS geometry calculation in mkfs is now compatible with both SD Card specification and also LBA-Assist Translation. Moreover mkfs now has also a new option -g for specifying CHS geometry manually if it is needed for compatibility with some SD card readers. CHS geometry is part of FAT boot sector which mkfs.fat must fill.

fsck now checks for DOS Clean Shutdown bit and marks filesystem as clean after successful run. This is for compatibility with Microsft Windows 98 and also with Windows NT-based variants.

Dependency on systemd/udev was completely removed from mkfs tool. But there is no lost or removed functionality. Existing systemd/udev code was rewritten to directly access sysfs and new implementation has less lines of code as previous implementation which used systemd/udev libraries.

mkfs was fixed to setup FAT32 backup boot sector correctly.

mkfs's -D option (BIOS drive number) was relaxed to support also higher level hard disk and floppy devices (second, third, ...).

fsck now preserve reserved fields in info sector. They are used by other systems (e.g. FSIBOOT stage of lDOS boot32.asm), hence why are reserved.

fsck was extended to check and fix that first two entries in directory structures are . and ..

mkfs now aligns total number of sectors to be multiple of the value of sectors per track which is stored in FAT boot sector. This requirement is needed by DOS systems and also by Linux FAT tools from mtools project. Alignment can be turned off by -a option.

mkfs is now able to calculate FAT32 cluster size also for disks which have sector size different than 512 bytes. Note that this calculation is not optimal. It is just first step which ensures that mkfs does not fail during formatting Native 4K disks.

mkfs cluster calculation was fixed to correctly handle differences between FAT12 and FAT16 variants. mkfs now explicitly disallow to create FAT filesystem with 4085 or 4086 clusters because Windows fastfat.sys detects such filesystem as FAT12 but Linux msdos.ko/vfat.ko detects it as FAT16. mkfs now avoids this situation to happen by fully automatic increasing or decreasing cluster size.

fsck now has a new option -F which can be used to specify FAT table used for reading whole FAT filesystem. It can be useful in situation when user wants to do recovery and filesystem repairing from second FAT table independently of what fsck thinks that is the best.

fsck was extended to try fixing first FAT cluster but only when -F option is specified. Previously when first FAT cluster was broken, fsck just printed error: Both FATs appear to be corrupt. Giving up. and failed.

fatlabel was fixed to not call parts of fsck procedure and to not print warning or log messages on stdout as it conflicts with expected label output on stdout.

A test suite was heavily extended and now it also checks that fsck repairs broken filesystem into the expected state.

Assets 4

24 Jan 12:29

andreasbombe

v4.1

820c2f9

dosfstools 4.1

A test suite is now included and can be run with make check. The test suite requires xxd from the vim distribution to recreate image files from hexdumps and also adds a dependency on automake 1.11 or later for building from sources other than the release tarball.

Now the default for mkfs for filesystems smaller than 512 MB is 64 heads / 32 sectors to make the defaults a bit more in line with the old defaults used up to 3.0.28.

Other changes are fixes, some of them user visible, such as setting the sector size by command line option for mkfs working again after being broken in 4.0.

Fixed a possible fatlabel crash when writing a label to an unlabelled filesystem and the given label contains printf style format specifiers.

When circular cluster chains were detected and the -t option was not given, fsck used to truncate the file to zero length while not updating the free cluster count. This required a second fsck run to clear. Now it always truncates to the last cluster that begins the loop, as it is supposed to.

The parsing of octal character specifications for filenames in the -u and -d options of fsck now works. It was broken in some ancient version and would always fail.

Assets 6

06 May 01:47

andreasbombe

v4.0

786e66e

dosfstools 4.0

The programs are now portable to non-Linux operating systems. To that end, the build system has been converted to use autotools. There have been Linux specifics in a lot of places which have been either eliminated or should have equivalents so that it should now work in other Unix-like environments. It has been tested on FreeBSD and OS X.

As part of making it portable all the code that assumed 8 bit major/minor numbers – and in fact masked out all other bits – has been cleaned up. Now mkfs.vfat should not misidentify devices anymore and require the -I option to override. The new device probing uses libudev (if available) to collect more information.

Fixed data corruption errors in fsck.fat: Writing to the third to last cluster on FAT12 with an odd number of clusters would corrupt the following cluster. In mkfs.fat, long existing bugs in bad cluster marking (from scanning or user supplied bad blocks list) were fixed so that it actually marks the correct clusters.

The automatic alignment of data clusters that was added in 3.0.8 and broken for FAT32 starting with 3.0.20 has been reinstated. If you need to create file systems for finicky devices that have broken FAT implementations use the option -a to disable alignment.

Assets 6

16 May 01:48

andreasbombe

v3.0.28

85022fe

dosfstools 3.0.28

The major user visible change in this release is that fsck.fat now defaults to interactive repair mode which previously had to be selected with -r. The previous default of a read only check mode was confusing to users who had to repeat a potentially lengthy fsck.fat run with the right option in order to actually fix their file system. It was also pointless – the interactive repair mode already won't write anything without asking for confirmation.

mkfs.fat now allows choosing 0xF0 as the media byte which was previously rejected.

mkfs.fat now supports the --invariant option to facilitate testing mkfs.fat itself. It will reproducibly generate filesystems without random or time based differences between them when all else is identical.

Bugs fixed in fsck.fat are a read one byte beyond the end of an allocated array when checking some FAT12 filesystems, and checking that the first cluster of a file as specified in the directory entry is not 1. Previously it could attempt to follow a block chain starting on cluster 1 and segfault when the conditions are right.

Assets 6

12 Nov 00:48

andreasbombe

v3.0.27

cb98ae2

dosfstools 3.0.27

This is a pure bug fix release. The major bugs fixed:

fatlabel did not recognize long file names and mistook long file name segments in the root directory for labels. This caused output of garbage when asked to print the label and damage to the root directory (loss of long file name after fsck) when used to set the label.
A fsck.fat check introduced in 3.0.26 triggered use of uninitialized fields in the constructed root directory entry, which randomly caused the code checking file names to consider the empty "file name" of the root directory to be bad:

$ /sbin/fsck.fat -y bad.img
fsck.fat 3.0.26 (2014-03-07)
/
Bad short file name ().
Auto-renaming it.
Renamed to
bad.img: 14 files, 19388/403266 clusters
And finally fsck.fat will not print the version string anymore every time the -v option is encountered.

Assets 6

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Releases: dosfstools/dosfstools

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