Lpc2000

Hi Charles

I've been working with FAT for a long time and it really isn't that
bad...
of cause there's a lot of ways to go bad (messing up allocation tables
etcetera) but Microsoft Scandisk (and others) can almost always save the
most damaged errors I've tried to make both on purpose and by accident
(bad code) and if you know how to handle the FAT you can use WinHex to
make a read out of the good portions... also there's a lot of counter
measures build into FAT for instance there's two (or more) allocation
tables so that if one of them goes bad the other one (which is
constantly updated) should be able to replace it with out user
intervention 

I personally think you won't have a problem with writing/reading to/from
FAT if you have a way of un mounting the file system before you remove
the media and have a Power fail circuit that detect under voltage on the
main supply and un mounts the FAT automatically ...  (been there done
that, and working on second year in real life :)

Best regards
Lasse Madsen


-----Original Message-----
From: embeddedjanitor [mailto:manningc2@...] 
Sent: 23. september 2004 22:17
To: lpc2000@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [lpc2000] Re: FAT file system ==>warning

I have read parts of the thread on FAT file system, and feel some 
moral responsibility to raise a warning.

If you're using FAT as a method of storing/retrieving non-critical 
data, fine.

Sometimes you need to share data with Micriosft PCs and don't have 
much choice.

If, however, you're using FAT to store critical data (ie FAT fails, 
then system fails), be warned that FAT is terrible at this job and you 
should consider some other file system strategy.

According to http://www.datalight.com/product_detail.asp?
p_id=22&archive=0  up to 80% of product failures in devices using FAT 
can be blamed on FAT file system corruption. Of course they have 
something to sell, so one should treat their view with some suspicion. 
[Having written a log-structured file system, I disagree with most of 
the things they say about those too].
Still, I am aware of FAT causing significant problems for many 
systems.

IMHO use something other than FAT if you can.


-- Charles





 
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