Bug 15921

Summary:	VFAT partition detection problem on an USB flash
Product:	hal	Reporter:	Stanislav Brabec <sbrabec>
Component:	misc	Assignee:	David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) <zeuthen>
Status:	RESOLVED NOTOURBUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:
Attachments:	lshal_flash.lst

Description Stanislav Brabec 2008-05-13 04:36:10 UTC

Created attachment 16506 [details]
lshal_flash.lst

I connected a brand new A-DATA 4GB MyFlash PD15 FlashDrive USB2.0 to my computer. It was preformatted with one partition and FAT file system in the partition 1.

Partition was correctly recognized by the kernel, but GNOME volume manager (hal) did not recognize it. Manual mount as vfat works.

Attaching lshal output (hal-0.5.10_git20080319).

Flash image stored in https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=388248#c2

Reproduced on: openSUSE 10.3 (hal-0.5.9_git20070831-13.2), openSUSE 11.0 beta2 (hal-0.5.10_git20080319-17).

Comment 1 Stanislav Brabec 2008-05-19 05:40:54 UTC

Novell bug was closed as WONTFIX with this comment:

The partition looks like a FAT32 volume, but it misses the signature to
identify the volume. It is defined by the FAT filesystem:
  LeadSig: 0x41615252
  "The signature is used to validate that this is a Info sector"

We can not relax that check, because we will very likely wrongly identify
volumes which are not FAT32. Sorry, you have to reformat the volume, if you
want autodetection.

-

From the UI view, it would be nice to provide an information, that a flash memory with an unknown/invalid format was inserted.

Comment 2 Danny Kukawka 2008-08-26 05:53:36 UTC

If you have the following entries in lshal:

 volume.fstype = ''  (string)
 volume.fsusage = ''  (string)
 volume.is_partition = true  (bool)

You (or the desktop) can assume there is no filesystem on the partition or that there were problems to identify the fstype. It's up to the desktop to do something with these info.

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