Hi there.
> On Thu, 24 Feb 2000 22:18:03 +0300 (MSK), "Khimenko Victor"
> <khim@sch57.msk.ru> said:
>> There ARE such way: both FAT and EXT2FS use serial numbers. Of
>> course it's filesystem-specific thing but two mentioned above
>> are by far most common ones in Linux world.
Let's be accurate: both fat and ext2 CAN use serial numbers. However,
neither is forced to, and certainly with fat partitions, there are
plenty that don't have any serial numbers in place - any formatted
prior to MSDOS 6.00 and never reformatted, for example.
Even with Win9x based systems, there are several formatters around
that achieve higher than normal capacities on fat format floppies that
don't bother putting the serial number (or any other part of the BPB
extension its in) on the said floppy.
Even when they do have a serial number, it's all too common for it to
be duplicated. Indeed, some of the high capacity formatters ALWAYS
allocate the same serial number to the disks they format, and others
allocate the same series of sequence numbers within each formatting
session, which amounts to the same thing.
> But there is no knowledge of such things in the block device or
> VFS layers, and old ext2 filesystems won't necessarily have a
> uuid.
SCT is probably far more au fait with ext2 tools than I am...
> The potential for things going wrong is awesome.
Personally, I believe they are so high that anything that can't give a
rock solid guarantee that it has correctly identified the disk that
was removed shouldn't even be considered.
Best wishes from Riley.
* Copyright (C) 1999, Memory Alpha Systems.
* All rights and wrongs reserved.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| There is something frustrating about the quality and speed of Linux |
| development, ie., the quality is too high and the speed is too high, |
| in other words, I can implement this XXXX feature, but I bet someone |
| else has already done so and is just about to release their patch. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
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