Dear port-i386,

I am currently writing a tool to assist the analysis of firmware images
[1], and as part of this I thought it would be adequate to implement
detection of FAT filesystems.

During some testing of my code I noticed that some installation floppies
(at least [2] and [3]) contain illegal boot sectors per the official
standard [4].

Here is what I obtain:
Analyzing file: boot-com1.fs
Matching FAT signature #7 at offset 0
correct boot code, oem "NetBSD20", illegal bytes/sector, illegal
sectors/cluster
Score: 22%

(the illegal values reported here are zeros)

As a comparison, from another floppy image [5]:
Analyzing file: boot.img
Matching FAT signature #6 at offset 0
correct boot code, oem "SYSLINUX", 512 bytes/sector, 1 sectors/cluster
FAT12 with 2847 clusters
Score: 100%


I know that, given the history of the format, the FAT "standard" hardly
matters. However, I think it would be better to give whoever potential
new user running foo-knows-what OS a better chance to read the disk
properly.

Just my thoughts, and sorry for the poor formatting below.

[1] http://uberwall.org/releases.html "UWfirmforce"
[2]
ftp://ftp.de.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-3.1/i386/installation/floppy/boot-big.fs
[3]
ftp://ftp.de.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-3.1/i386/installation/floppy/boot-com1.fs
[4]
http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/1/161ba512-40e2-4cc9-843a-923143f3456c/fatgen103.doc
[5]
ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/dists/sarge/main/installer-i386/current/images/floppy/boot.img

-- 
khorben