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Old November 26th 16, 10:25 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Jonathan N. Little
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Posts: 38
Default Can't format 64 GB USB flash drives as FAT32?

Paul wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Paul wrote:
One thing about foreign NTFS access, is the risk depends
on what you're doing with it.


True. Access with Linux can harm as easily as it can fix if you don't
know what you are doing since all are just files...

If you bring an NTFS data drive to a foreign computer,
the risk with analogs of the NTFS-3G driver are low.

Just be careful what you do to C: (OS) partitions over there.
I've trashed Win7 C: via Linux, while reading files in
C:\System Volume Information. Luckily, I had a backup
image made two hours earlier at the time. You don't get
that lucky very often. I tried to repair with CHKDSK but
it didn't work. Whatever the problem was, it was that bad.


Well futzing with the System Volume Information can get you in trouble
regardless of the OS, but I have repaired a number of Windows systems
with Linux. Removed corrupted Windows-invalid named files, caused by
drive corruption, infections, and copy "protection". Hunted down hidden
regenerating malware. Only issue that I ever noticed while piecing
together corrupted Windows profiles with Linux is transferred files
where missing the 8.3 old DOS listings.


My purpose in mentioning my Win7 incident, is to say
the risks using foreign NTFS to work on disks is low,
but the risk is not zero. If you attempt to open
C:\System Volume Information while in Windows, you
get "Access Denied". And you will find there are
a few files in Windows, that no Windows utility will even
list. The utilities all get a kind of Access Denied
result. Even NFI.exe cannot list everything
on an NTFS file system, and that utility "lives"
for such a purpose.

By going in there, I knew the dangers, but my assumption
was, that any sort of read-access would be "safe". I was
wrong. Big time wrong. I think it's OK to "ls -al"
while in there, but "sum one-of-big-files" is
off the table. The checksum of the big files happens
to be zero for all of them. I used some version
of "sum" (arithmetic checksum) with the idea being,
to see if the entire file was filled with zeros,
which it was. So whatever the file system indicates
for a structure in those, a naive access reads
out as all-zeros. But then on a reboot, it
would no longer boot. And C: was ruined.


Maybe the command wrote some type of temp file that did you in. When
fixing be-malwared system I have to remember to remove .trash-000 when I
am done else the Windows user won't be able to remove it later.


So if I had to go in there today, I would switch
from RW to RO before trying that again :-) I would
wear galoshes, carry a climbing rope and equipment,
pack a few extra ham sandwiches, to make my escape.


That what I would have done, if not editing. Just mount read-only.

--
Take care,

Jonathan
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