Subject: Re: MSDOS FS question [FAQ]
To: VaX#n8 <vax@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>
From: John F. Woods <jfw@ksr.com>
List: current-users
Date: 10/17/1994 09:47:13
> I'm getting the ubiquitous "Device not configured" message even though I
> put MSDOS in the fstype field of the disklabel.  What is the Right Thing
> to do?

"MS-DOS".  Which I discovered by typing "strings disklabel".  It would be
nice if disklabel issued an error message when it doesn't recognize the
fstype.

Since I was recently complaining about disklabel, I uncovered some things
that others might want to have handy:  Though I couldn't find it
documented anywhere, disklabel (on the 386) assumes that partition 'd'
is the entire raw disk, and partition 'c' is the entire NetBSD portion
(with respect to the MS-DOS partitioning info).  Note that the
documentation claims that partition 'c' is what disklabel assumes for
the entire raw disk.  Presumably the installation process sets all this
up by magic, but my recent adventure came from exchanging the identities
of my SCSI ID#0 and ID#1 drives, and previously the ID#1 drive was not
partitioned by DOS...

> And, does mount_msdos support the most recent type of MS-DOS fs...
> the large one, or whatever it is called (>32MB)?
> The manpage still says:
>      The msdos filesystem is not known to work reliably with filesystems cre-
>      ated by versions of MS-DOS later than version 3.3.

I have been able to mount and read my 120MB DOS partition, but I guess
I'm glad I haven't tried to write it yet...  :-)