ext3 filesystem on my sdhc card????

@gdanko wrote:
Works fine with any filesystem outside of FAT. I think it’s just FAT weirdness.

Unfortunately we have to stick to FAT/VFAT here. But you should not give up … :wink:

There are many potential pitfalls in using VFAT on Linux and there are different ways of handling upper/lower case filenames on different M$ windows versions too! Every time you write and read on VFAT with two different systems (either operating system, kernel, codepage, language settings etc.) you must take special care if you aim for compatibility. Just for the curious: you have a similar behaviour if you write and read to any ext[234] partition with two different locale settings, eg. UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1. The hard way for Linux to handle VFAT essentially is because you need to satisfy both ways

VFAT(FAT using 8.3 limited ASCII + LFN using UTF16)   <====>  EXT[234] on any locale (UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, …)

If you copy files both ways between your linux box and the Fuze (and external sdhc card used with it) and want the Fuze display names as you see them on your linux box then I would recommend the following procedure:

  1. make sure the Fuze’s internal flash storage is formatted by the player itself (not by windows or linux)
  2. apply the latest firmware update
  3. make sure the vfat filesystem on your sdhc card is not corrupt and supports long filenames (LFN) by using fsck.vfat, if not you could try to repair the filesystem or just create a new one (mkfs.vfat -F32 devname)
  4. if and only if 1-3 are fine check and play with your current locale settings and mount options
  5. hardwire your best findings (e.g. if they differ from automounter defaults)

In your case the automounter chooses some mount option according to the information it retrieves from hal. Anything not handled by hal will use kernel compile defaults. These do vary a lot from one kernel version to the next and from one release of a given distribution to the next. Again, if you would write a filename to any VFAT partition and read it back later on another maybe updated release of your distribution then there is no guarantee the filenames would show up as before!

What can you do? As I told you in number 4: try by yourself and take full control of locale settings and mount options. Note that if you change anything with respect to these two settings then you have to

  • newly copy your test files to the VFAT
  • unmount the partition
  • view the filenames on the Fuze
  • connect the Fuze to the PC
  • mount the partition with the very same options
  • read the filenames with the very same locale settings

If you want to go this way I’ll try my best to help you any further. Good luck!