>In the process I attempted to write my root partition to my MSDOS
>partition with a command resembling this:
>% find / | cpio -o | gzip -9 > /msdos/d/netbsd/slash.gz
>
>This cruised along happily for a while, then muttered something
>about "lost inode: 0".  This made me somewhat nervous, though the
>MSDOS file system code has worked well for me up to now.  I rebooted
>and selected MSDOS, which informed me that my 250 MB D: drive had
>"170MB in lost clusters in 4000 (or so) chains", which is Microsoft
>for "you're hosed now buddy".  Luckily for me there was only one file
>I really cared about, and a friend who knows about these things helped
>me locate it.

FWIW, I've had weird things happen when using my MS-DOS partition when it (the
MS-DOS partition) was corrupted.  I don't know how forgiving the MS-DOS fs
code is of filesystem errors.

Side note: after I had these problems, I was curious as to how often MS-DOS
filesystems get corrupted, so the next day at work I ran CHKDSK on the 3 or 4
PC's we have.  _Every single one_ of them had errors of some sort.  Of course,
your milage may vary, but I would check your MS-DOS partition before I started
writing a lot to it.

--Ken