One of my CF cards has a FAT16 filesystem that my Solaris 10
SPARC refuses to mount. Any tips on diagnosing this? The card
has some pictures taken with my digital camera that I really
don't want to lose.

I mount my camera (Nikon D300) as a filesystem using a USB
cable. The results are the same, positive or negative, if
I use a card reader instead of the camera. When I go to
mount /dev/dsk/c3t0d0s2:c as type pcfs the kernel logs an
error

NOTICE: pcfs: FAT signature error
NOTICE: pcfs: illegal disk format

My other cards mount fine. The bad card is 2GB; the good
cards are 2GB and 8GB.

Google leads me to a problem with 2K sectors. I looked
at the bits in the first sector of the partition on my
card and found sector size 512.

I know the pictures are on the card because I can view them
in my camera; "strings" on a copy of the card also shows
plausible text timestamps. (In fact, a user-mode tool to
extract the files from the copy I made of the card would
suit me just fine.)

My kernel boot version string:
SunOS Release 5.10 Version Generic_118833-33 64-bit

(When I went to review Sunsolve's used-to-be-free patch
clusters to get up to date the site told me I couldn't
get them without paying.)

--
John Carr (jfc@mit.edu)

In article <47f9958a$0$297$b45e6eb0@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>,
I wrote:
>(In fact, a user-mode tool to extract the files from the copy
>I made of the card would suit me just fine.)

After I wrote this I remembered mtools, which I hadn't
used since kernel FAT support was added oh so many years
ago. mtools also failed, but I could step through with
a debugger and find out why. The third byte of the FAT
is expected to be FF. It isn't. Setting the flag to
skip sanity checks allowed me to recover my files.
But I'd still like a solution for mounting as a filesystem,
as using mtools would require copying 2GB-epsilon every
time I want to look at the card. mtools wants the partition,
not the whole disk, and as far as I know Solaris SPARC's ":c"
suffix only works when mounting a filesystem.

--
John Carr (jfc@mit.edu)

John F. Carr wrote:
> In article <47f9958a$0$297$b45e6eb0@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>,
> I wrote:
>
>>(In fact, a user-mode tool to extract the files from the copy
>>I made of the card would suit me just fine.)
>
>
> After I wrote this I remembered mtools, which I hadn't
> used since kernel FAT support was added oh so many years
> ago. mtools also failed, but I could step through with
> a debugger and find out why. The third byte of the FAT
> is expected to be FF. It isn't. Setting the flag to
> skip sanity checks allowed me to recover my files.
> But I'd still like a solution for mounting as a filesystem,
> as using mtools would require copying 2GB-epsilon every
> time I want to look at the card. mtools wants the partition,
> not the whole disk, and as far as I know Solaris SPARC's ":c"
> suffix only works when mounting a filesystem.
>

I've had similar problems w/ some of my cards on my Ultra 20. Creating
a filesystem using Solaris solves the problem. Apparently some of the
cameras and/or card vendors are a bit liberal in their implementation of
the filesystem.

Have Fun!
Reg