I could be misremembering things, as it's been a long time since I've run the MS flavor of DOS on any of my systems, but I seem to remember this being kind of a known issue back in the day with MS Scandisk, in that you were not to use it if you also used LFNs on your file system. Since it was made before the LFN standard was, it wasn't aware of the extra naming data present in the FAT and would think the file system was corrupt. Letting it go ahead and fix any issues it found would mangle your file names and possible cause data loss, as I recall.
I vaguely remember running into this once myself when dual-booting Win95 and MS-DOS 6.22; using the DOS Scandisk after mostly using Win95 on one particular drive resulted in it finding a bevy of "errors" which were really just it finding LFN data where it expected to find nothing (or something like that). I simply exited out of Scandisk, not letting it make any changes, and all was well. Win95 was none the wiser and its own Scandisk (which, by necessity, _is_ LFN aware) indicated that everything was working as intended with no errors. Sent with Proton Mail secure email. On Tuesday, June 10th, 2025 at 11:48 AM, Jerome Shidel via Freedos-devel <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > Hi All, > > A few days ago, Willi discovered an odd File Name related bug. > > When installing the ADT2 package[1] from the repository at FD.LOD.BZ using > FDNPKG, it would install the 999 files in the package. However, the > FREEDOS\PACKAGES\ADT2.LST file would only contain about 300 entries. > Uninstalling the package would obviously leave many files behind. There may > have also been some file system corruption during the install. > > The issue did not occur under DOSBox Staging with FreeDOS installed in > "Hybrid mode". The "Hybrid mode" install under DOSBox(s) is mostly the same > as a that for a virtual machines or real hardware with one major exception. > The "Hybrid mode" install does not use the FreeDOS kernel. It uses the DOSBox > kernel. This permits the easy exchange of files to and from the host system. > Other things, like FreeCOM and drivers from FreeDOS are used in the install. > This type of install is extremely useful as a development environment for > many types of DOS programs. > > I then tested this under VirtualBox and could replicate the issue he found > easily. However, the problem installing ADT2 did not occur when DOSLFN was > not loaded. But wait, there is more… > > Willi also tested a few other packages and discovered a similar issue with > Arachne[2]. But in this case, the presence of DOSLFN did not matter. But, > installing via FDNPKG or FDINST made the difference. > > In regards to both packages, there are a couple odd characters in some file > names. One contains an ampersand and the other exclamation points. According > to a wiki on 8.3 file names[3], these are permissible without LFN support. > > At this time it is unclear where the bug is located. It could reside in the > KERNEL, DOSLFN, FDNPKG or elsewhere. > > The new FDRepo v3 can pull files directly from GitLab and generate packages > for download/update repositories. When it does that, it scans for and > pre-compresses LFN files using an algorithm based on that wiki page[3]. I > could easily make it more restrictive than what is permitted in 8.3 file > names. However, that would not fix the actual problem and could have other > side effects when installing packages. > > Jerome > > [1] https://fd.lod.bz/repository/latest/html/en/sound/adt2/index.html > [2] https://fd.lod.bz/repository/latest/html/en/net/arachne/index.html > [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.3_filename > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
