I had some trouble attempting to use fsck_msdos on a zip disk.  Since
this was with a relatively old system (1.2G vintage), I didn't let it
worry me.  But I did save a dd image of the disk.

Now, on a relatively recent system (built from sources supped
1998-04-23), I find the same problem, or at least the same symptom:

[Sparkle - root] 10> vnconfig /dev/rvnd0c /home/mouse/tmp/zip.dd
[Sparkle - root] 11> fsck_msdos /dev/rvnd0c
** /dev/rvnd0c
Invalid sector size: 8293[Sparkle - root] 12> 

Now, both sparkle and the 1.2Gish machine I mentioned above are SPARCs.
Are the msdos filesystem tools supposed to work on SPARCs?  It occurs
to me that they may not have been well tested on big-endian machines.

Alternatively, there could be something else wrong.  The only clue I
have that sounds to me as though it might possibly have anything to do
with it is that someone who knows more about DOS boxen than I do said
something about zip disks always having the filesystem on partition 4,
and indeed on the Linux machine I eventually used dosfsck on to repair
the filesystem, I used /dev/sda4, and on the SGI that we originally
tried with, upon mounting it showed up with "partition=4".  So it
occurs to me that maybe the fsdos tools don't know how to deal with
partitioning, though I can't see how that can be when people regularly
partition disks with msdos filesystems on them.  For what it's worth,
applying disklabel to the vnd produces a partition table showing only
an a partition, covering the full 96 megabytes of the disk; using
disklabel on the real zip disk on the 1.2Gish system produced similar
output.  So perhaps there *isn't* a real partition table there and the
"partition 4" thing is a software fiction.

In case you can't tell, I'm confused and would appreciate any help
anyone has to offer.  There is no immediate problem; mounting the disk
on the Linux box has addressed the need of the moment.  But there is
clearly something I don't understand going on here, and if nothing else
there's a functional sense in which the msdos tools don't work, though
admittedly I could be using them wrong.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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