Re: msdos FS bug

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
7 Jul 1998 01:38:04 GMT

Followup to: <199807070029.UAA03764@hilfy.ece.cmu.edu>
By author: "Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH" <allbery@kf8nh.apk.net>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> Partitions have boot blocks as well.
>
> Reiteration: *MS-DOS doesn't have a superblock*. The filesystem metadata
> are encoded into the boot block... but you can't always tell that what's
> there is valid. And some versions of DOS don't bother to fill in all the
> pieces.
>

Yes it does have a superblock. The fact that it is (a) broken in far
too many ways to list here, (b) stupidly encoded, and (c) in a
brain-damaged location doesn't change the fact that it is the
superblock.

In fact, the fact that the superblock is a part of the boot block is
probably the *least* brain-damaged part of the whole exercise (there
are actually pseudo-valid reasons for doing it that way.)

-hpa

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