Hello!

> (contrary to their own spec).  Net result is that this pointer might
> point to some non-free cluster, after you happen to write something to
> your FAT32 partition with W9x.

This is ok as it's documented by Microsoft that this cluster is only a
hint. As result, you must verify every time that this cluster is really
free.

> (As an aside, I'm not even sure what they tried to achieve with this.)

Maybe this explain it (from Microsoft FAT32 documentation, fatgen102.ps):

--- cut ---
FSI_Nxt_Free

This is a hint for the FAT driver. It indicates the cluster number at
which the driver should start looking for free clusters. Because a
FAT32 FAT is large, it can be rather time consuming if there are a
lot of allocated clusters at the start of the FAT and the driver starts
looking for a free cluster starting at cluster 2. Typically this value is
set to the last cluster number that the driver allocated. If the value is
0xFFFFFFFF, then there is no hint and the driver should start
looking at cluster 2. Any other value can be used, but should be
checked first to make sure it is a valid cluster number for the
volume.
---  cut ---


Tschuess
   ...Frank

--
http://www.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~fnaumann/
e-Mail: fnaumann@freemint.de