Questions[fat32](server)

I have console access to an embedded linux device. This device has flash memory part of which is partitioned as a FAT filesystem.

Its running linux-2.6.31.

However I am seeing these errors on the console these days and the FAT file system becomes read only.

111109:154925 FAT: Filesystem error (dev loop0)
111109:154925 fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 0)
111109:154925 FAT: Filesystem error (dev loop0)
111109:154925 fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 0)

I cannot understand why this happened? What is the root cause? And what is the fix? I would appreciate answers that can point me how to investigate the possible root cause of this issue on the device.

I have a question concerning the creation of an drive image with dd.

Normally i would simply type: "dd if=/dev/foo of=/dev/bar". But in this case i only have a fat32 formatted drive at hand, which should be used for the output. Fat32 only allows files up to 2GB (Or was that 4GB?). Anyway the image would be too big.

My question is, is it possible to create the image in a bunch of smaller files? And how would one restore the splitted image? I'm really not good at bash commands and would be happy for any suggestions. By the way, is there a good book concerning shell scripts, or are there some good tutorials you would recommend?

What is the best way to format a USB drive with FAT32 (for Mac compatibility) from within Windows 7/Vista?

I ask because the Disk Management only lets you pick exFAT (because the disk is over 32 GB I believe).

Doing it from the command line with diskpart doesn't seem to work either.

Should Flash Drives be formatted NTFS? What are the Pros & Cons of doing so?

I have a volume with files on it that will need to be copied between Mac, Linux, and Windows machines. I want to ensure that there are no surprises with:

• file size
• filename length
• filename character set
• number of nested directories

Am I correct to assume that anything (in the above list) that is legal in FAT32 will be also be legal in NTFS, EXT3, and HFS+?

If not, is there a script/utility I can run, without actually copying the files to all of these types of volumes, that will print a list potential problems?