[Nuke]

i found another reason vista sucks. i put in some removeable drive bays into my computer so that i could backup my files to a removeable hd. anyway the drive im using is formatted for fat32, for compatability, sence i use it on linux, many versions of windows (including 98) and even freedos so i can play my mp3s in mpxplay. anyway i copy my docs folder over and on every 4th or 5th file i get an error "invalid msdos function". this is the first time ive seen this error. does microsoft seriously not want me to backup my files? theres nothing wrong with any of theese files, and theres nothing wrong with the hd.

the drive im copying too used to be ntfs. but i needed fat32 for compatability. so i boot into linux and used gparted to create a fat32 partition (vista no longer offers that option) on the drive.  its a 150 gig western digital and its fairly new. anyway i boot back into windows so i could start copying files, and i get that error over and over again, so i set that box which will tell it to repeat the skip option. and it started copying most of the files but of them still remain uncopied. i might just copy them over in linux, it would probibly be safer.

anyway take my models forler for nukemod, vista refuses to copy about 10% of the stuff in there. whoever wrote this os is a moron.

*edit*
grr, looks like i put it in the wrong forum again. can we get rid of the general in freespace discussion, cause it sorta gets confused with just general discussion quite abit

[castor]

IIRC I had something similar with win98, a year-two ago. Dunno.. the problem could be on Linux's side.

[S-99]

You could blame it on ms wanting fat32 to die with a vengance. It could be on the linux side. I'd just back up the files on a computer that you can back them up to, reformat the drive to fat32, or rather ntfs (linux is now successfully read/write compatible with ntfs). And then pull a reformat with fat32. But, you might as well format to ntfs and put your files back on there either way whichever format you decided to have. Now the only problem i see with ntfs is idk whether or not osx supports it or not, so unless your plugging your drive into an osx machine i don't really see a problem. You should test that actually, plug into an osx machine sometime and see if it has ntfs read/write support, and if it does, then you can say goodbye to all of your fat32 woes completely for a superior drive format.

But, yes, ntfs is a lot better than fat32, linux does support read/write capabilities with ntfs, so if you chose to replace fat32 with ntfs, you'd definitely get rid of all of your fat32 problems completely. On the other hand reformat that drive to fat32 and put your data back on and see if that problem persists or comes up again, then you'll definitely know for sure if you should try out ntfs on your drive.

EDIT: for ntfs read/write support your distro needs the ntfs-3g driver....it's ok, all distros have it...or at least better have it. It's as easy as trying to write to an ntfs medium in linux to show if you have the driver or not. If you don't, take a quick stroll down repository lane, grab the ntfs-3g driver, install, and configure it.

[Scooby_Doo]

Isn't writing with NTFS in linux still rather dangerous?

[Cyker]

Not with the ntfs-3g driver - It has near-perfect compatibility with NTFS. 'Bug-perfect' I believe the term is.

Only thing is there is a risk with Vista because MS have probably tried to screw with it again just to make life difficult.


As for the problem; There are lots of reasons that error can pop up, but the most common reasons are hard disk impending failure, disk structure corruption and FAT-entry corruption (Linux uses FAT-copy 1; Windows NT-based systems use FAT-copy 2).

Additionally, on WindowsXP and up, FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB can also cause this for files that are >32GB boundary.
I don't know why because Win2k and less (Even Win98 and 95OSR2!) can handle FAT32 disks much bigger than this, albeit with ridiculously large cluster sizes.


My recommendation - Either install the ext[2|3]fs driver in Windows (Edit: Which doesn't work in Vista), or use ntfs-3g in Linux.


Another recommendation - Get a refund for Vista   (Think about it - A full refund for Ultimate edition could get you a nVidia 8800GTX!)

[Nuke]

i sorta fixed it by disabling indexing. it worked on everything but my code folder. all my code projects backed up fine but my freespace code folder refused to copy about a thousand or so files. this is not a big deal as i can easily pull another copy of that from cvs. i think it may be something to do with something torise cvs does to the attributes. i never liked using indexed searches because they frequently tend to fail to find something thats there.

i perfer ntfs for windows stuff and ext3 for linux. so i keep ntfs utils in linux and ext utils for windows. but since i still use dos and win98 and sometimes need to pull files off the backup drive. the main reason i use dos (freedos) and mpxplay on a machine which i use as little more than a stereo component. i play mp3s right off the backup drive. i was using ntfs4dos but that was sometimes giving me errors if i scrolled through my audio files quickly.

[S-99]

Yes you are right. Ntfs is good for the partition that windows is installed on, ntfs on the other hand is not really good for storage or backup partitions though. I had ntfs **** on me sometimes where i lost gigabytes of data. So i moved everything to ext3, and i had w2k and xp at the time so those did work great with the ext2ifs driver.