path: root/NEWS

dosfstools 4.2 - released 2021-01-31
====================================

fatlabel now accepts two new options. When given the -i or --volume-id option,
fatlabel changes to an alternate mode where it displays or changes the volume
serial number instead of the volume label. With the -r or --reset option, it
will remove the label or (in the alternate mode) generate a new volume serial
number.

The user prompting for interactive fsck has been overhauled. Now it will
directly react to a pressed key without the user having to additionally press
enter. The changed prompting is also consistently repeating the prompt when
invalid input is given.

The legacy check whether it is running on Atari hardware when compiled for 68k
in order to automatically switch to Atari mode is now disabled by default. It
can be compiled in with the new configure switch --enable-atari-check.

Both mkfs and fsck now have a new option --variant=TYPE where TYPE can be
'standard' or 'atari' to explicitly select one of those variants rather than
having to toggle between them with -A.

fsck, mkfs and fatlabel were fixed to process volume label correctly. Previously
there were many issues during processing labels. Fixes issues are: leading byte
0xE5 of root label needs to be handled in special way, label cannot contain some
special characters, label itself is stored according to the current DOS codepage
which may be specified by a new --codepage option. fatlabel now reads volume
label only from the root directory to be compatible with existing systems like
MS-DOS 5.00, MS-DOS 6.22, MS-DOS 7.10, Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows 7, 8, 10
and also with the Linux mlabel from mtools project. fsck was extended to fix
incorrect volume labels and ensure that volume label from the root directory is
same as the volume label stored in boot sector. Old versions of dosfslabel read
label only from the boot sector. So with all these changes fsck now ensures
compatibility with both MS-DOS/Windows and old Linux/dosfslabel world.

fsck now allows spaces in the middle of SFNs. Previous behavior (when spaces
are disallowed) can be achieved by a new option -S.

Both mkfs and fsck now have fixed Year 2038 Bug. mkfs may still set filesystem
timestamp to 1980-01-01 00:00:00 (beginning of the FAT era) in case operating
system has Year 2038 Bug and cannot provide current time in time_t variable.

Some memory leaks were fixed in fatlabel and fsck to make valgrind happy.

Processing of command line arguments in all tools were fixed to ensure that
invalid options are not accepted anymore and proper error message is thrown
instead of trying to continue with uninitialized or undefined value.

In fsck and fatlabel were fixed issues that faulty filesystems were able to
trigger integer overflows during reading them.

mkfs now has a new option --offset for specifying offset at which filesystem
would start. This is useful when formatting FAT filesystem on disk image with
MBR table without need to use loopback kernel driver with partx to access only
specific partition.

All tools now can be compiled without iconv library and in this case they
support only CP850 codepage which is integrated into tools. This internal
CP850 codepage can be used also when tools were compiled with iconv library
which do not support CP850 (e.g. iconv from GNU libc without installed gconv
shared libraries).

Manual pages were updated to clarify some ambiguous options and descriptions.
fatlabel has a new section with details about volume label and codepage issues.

mkfs now has a new option --mbr which fills (fake) MBR table with one partition
which spans whole disk device. This (fake) MBR table is needed only for
non-removable disks used on Microsoft Windows systems and only when formatting
whole unpartitioned disk.

mkfs now calculates CHS geometry according to the SD Card Part 2 File System
Specification. For SD cards with more than 256MB capacity is this new CHS
calculation same as CHS calculation defined for hard disks via LBA-Assist
Translation. So CHS geometry calculation in mkfs is now compatible with both
SD Card specification and also LBA-Assist Translation. Moreover mkfs now has
also a new option -g for specifying CHS geometry manually if it is needed for
compatibility with some SD card readers. CHS geometry is part of FAT boot
sector which mkfs.fat must fill.

fsck now checks for DOS Clean Shutdown bit and marks filesystem as clean after
successful run. This is for compatibility with Microsft Windows 98 and also with
Windows NT-based variants.

Dependency on systemd/udev was completely removed from mkfs tool. But there is
no lost or removed functionality. Existing systemd/udev code was rewritten to
directly access sysfs and new implementation has less lines of code as previous
implementation which used systemd/udev libraries.

mkfs was fixed to setup FAT32 backup boot sector correctly.

mkfs's -D option (BIOS drive number) was relaxed to support also higher level
hard disk and floppy devices (second, third, ...).

fsck now preserve reserved fields in info sector. They are used by other systems
(e.g. FSIBOOT stage of lDOS boot32.asm), hence why are reserved.

fsck was extended to check and fix that first two entires in directory
structures are . and ..

mkfs now aligns total number of sectors to be multiple of the value of sectors
per track which is stored in FAT boot sector. This requirement is needed by DOS
systems and also by Linux FAT tools from mtools project. Alignment can be turned
off by -a option.

mkfs is now able to calculate FAT32 cluster size also for disks which have
sector size different than 512 bytes. Note that this calculation is not optimal.
It is just first step which ensures that mkfs does not fail during formatting
Native 4K disks.

mkfs cluster calculation was fixed to correctly handle differences between
FAT12 and FAT16 variants. mkfs now explicitly disallow to create FAT filesystem
with 4085 or 4086 clusters because Windows fastfat.sys detects such filesystem
as FAT12 but Linux msdos.ko/vfat.ko detects it as FAT16. mkfs now avoids this
situation to happen by fully automatic increasing or decreasing cluster size.

fsck now has a new option -F which can be used to specify FAT table used for
reading whole FAT filesystem. It can be useful in situation when user wants
to do recovery and filesystem repairing from second FAT table independently
of what fsck thinks that is the best.

fsck was extended to try fixing first FAT cluster but only when -F option is
specified. Previously when first FAT cluster was broken, fsck just printed
error: "Both FATs appear to be corrupt. Giving up." and failed.

fatlabel was fixed to not call parts of fsck procedure and to not print
warning or log messages on stdout as it conflicts with expected label
output on stdout.

A test suite was heavily extended and now it also checks that fsck repairs
broken filesystem into the expected state.

List of fixed issues:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=803391
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/13
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/18
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/22
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/29
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/32
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/38
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/39
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/43
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/45
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/52
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/53
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/54
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/64
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/66
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/69
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/70
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/74
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/88
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/99
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/111
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/139
https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/issues/151


dosfstools 4.1 - released 2017-01-24
====================================

A test suite is now included and can be run with "make check". The test suite
requires xxd from the vim distribution to recreate image files from hexdumps and
also adds a dependency on automake 1.11 or later for building from sources other
than the release tarball.

Now the default for mkfs for filesystems smaller than 512 MB is 64 heads / 32
sectors to make the defaults a bit more in line with the old defaults used up to
3.0.28.

Other changes are fixes, some of them user visible, such as setting the sector
size by command line option for mkfs working again after being broken in 4.0.

Fixed a possible fatlabel crash when writing a label to an unlabelled filesystem
and the given label contains printf style format specifiers.

When circular cluster chains were detected and the -t option was not given, fsck
used to truncate the file to zero length while not updating the free cluster
count. This required a second fsck run to clear. Now it always truncates to the
last cluster that begins the loop, as it is supposed to.

The parsing of octal character specifications for filenames in the -u and -d
options of fsck now works. It was broken in some ancient version and would
always fail.


dosfstools 4.0 - released 2016-05-06
====================================

The programs are now portable to non-Linux operating systems. To that end, the
build system has been converted to use autotools. There have been Linux
specifics in a lot of places which have been either eliminated or should have
equivalents so that it should now work in other Unix-like environments. It has
been tested on FreeBSD and OS X.

As part of making it portable all the code that assumed 8 bit major/minor
numbers - and in fact masked out all other bits - has been cleaned up. Now
mkfs.vfat should not misidentify devices anymore and require the -I option to
override. The new device probing uses libudev (if available) to collect more
information.

Fixed data corruption errors in fsck.fat: Writing to the third to last cluster
on FAT12 with an odd number of clusters would corrupt the following cluster. In
mkfs.fat, long existing bugs in bad cluster marking (from scanning or user
supplied bad blocks list) were fixed so that it actually marks the correct
clusters.

The automatic alignment of data clusters that was added in 3.0.8 and broken for
FAT32 starting with 3.0.20 has been reinstated. If you need to create file
systems for finicky devices that have broken FAT implementations use the option
-a to disable alignment.


dosfstools 3.0.28 - released 2015-05-16
=======================================

The major user visible change in this release is that fsck.fat now defaults to
interactive repair mode which previously had to be selected with -r. The
previous default of a read only check mode was confusing to users who had to
repeat a potentially lengthy fsck.fat run with the right option in order to
actually fix their file system. It was also pointless – the interactive repair
mode already won't write anything without asking for confirmation.

mkfs.fat now allows choosing 0xF0 as the media byte which was previously
rejected.

mkfs.fat now supports the --invariant option to facilitate testing mkfs.fat
itself. It will reproducibly generate filesystems without random or time based
differences between them when all else is identical.

Bugs fixed in fsck.fat are a read one byte beyond the end of an allocated array
when checking some FAT12 filesystems, and checking that the first cluster of a
file as specified in the directory entry is not 1. Previously it could attempt
to follow a block chain starting on cluster 1 and segfault when the conditions
are right.


dosfstools 3.0.27 - released 2014-11-12
=======================================

This is a pure bug fix release. The major bugs fixed:

* fatlabel did not recognize long file names and mistook long file name
  segments in the root directory for labels. This caused output of garbage when
  asked to print the label and damage to the root directory (loss of long file
  name after fsck) when used to set the label.

* A fsck.fat check introduced in 3.0.26 triggered use of uninitialized fields
  in the constructed root directory entry, which randomly caused the code
  checking file names to consider the empty "file name" of the root directory
  to be bad:

    $ /sbin/fsck.fat -y bad.img
    fsck.fat 3.0.26 (2014-03-07)
    /
    Bad short file name ().
    Auto-renaming it.
    Renamed to
    bad.img: 14 files, 19388/403266 clusters

* And finally fsck.fat will not print the version string anymore every time the
  -v option is encountered.