GNU bug report logs - #35722
Installer does not handle FAT16 file systems

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Message #23 received at 35722-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Graham Lee <graham <at> iamleeg.com>
To: Danny Milosavljevic <dannym <at> scratchpost.org>
Cc: Mathieu Othacehe <m.othacehe <at> gmail.com>, 35722-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#35722: Filesystem error in the installer
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 18:37:38 +0100

Hi,

> On 14 May 2019, at 18:00, Danny Milosavljevic <dannym <at> scratchpost.org> wrote:
> 
> Or just not let the user select "Format this partition" if we don't know how to
> format it.
> Also not let the user specify a mount point if we don't know how to mount it.

Thanks Danny, I appreciate you pushing a fix. I will find out how to make an updated installer and try again :).

Just to clear up, though, I was going through the guided partitioning, so didn’t either select to format the partition or try to mount it. It was already there, I have no opinion on it except that if it disappears my EFI probably breaks :). But this means that I’m not sure the fixes you described above would have helped in my situation. Also I would expect to install EFI-based GRUB so if I want to do that from the GUIX installer (and not, say, boot some other GNU/Linux installer to install GRUB), I would need to mount the FAT16 partition, or I [or the guided partitioning system] would need to know to recreate it as FAT32.

I understand that there are firmwares out there (I don’t know about mine) that won’t recognise small FAT partitions unless they are FAT16. On the other hand, the UEFI specification seems to expect the partition to be FAT32. So this is a case of different things working in theory and in practice. Also in practice: mkfs.fat will make small filesystems FAT16 by default, and some distros (notably, Fedora, which is what my target machine currently runs) don’t tell it otherwise. So even if the EFI partition is always FAT32 in theory, there will be practical cases where it’s FAT16.

Thanks again,
Graham.

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