Hi folks, my Psion 5MX uses a (V)FAT filesystem on its CompactFlash card. Mounting and reading it under Linux poses no problem, except that sometimes there are spurious directory entries. A Microsoft document specifying FAT: http://www.nondot.org/sabre/os/files/FileSystems/FatFormat.pdf says: If DIR_Name[0]==0x00, then the directory entry is free (same as for 0xE5) and there are no allocated directory entries after this one (all of the DIR_Name[0] bytes in all of the entries after this one are also set to 0). The special 0 value, rather than the 0xE5 value, indicates to FAT file system driver code that the rest of the entries in this directory do not need to be examined because they are all free. It seems that this is not completely true in the Psion world: when it marks an entry having DIR_Name[0] as 0x00, it does not erase anything which comes after it. So in this case you must stop scanning after finding such a 0x00 entry, or you will have old and/or random entries (in one case, the sector seems to have been used before for a data file, which gives quite extraordinairy file names listed!). According to the above specification (and presuming that it is valid), it should be safe to stop reading after a 0x00 entry anyway. The below patch implements that, and also fixes the case in which a new directory entry is added after or on top of such a marker. I can imagine that this patch is seen as too dangerous, in which case I hope that a new mount flag would be acceptable. A new patch could be made quite easily for this. The PsiLinux FAQ: http://linux-7110.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?url=faqs/backup_msdosfs.htm claims: The technical reason for the misbehaving msdos filesystem is that any directory created by EPOC or to which EPOC has added a cluster is affected by this behavior. EPOC (like ancient DOS) ignores any directory entries following a directory entry starting with a byte of zeros. Linux and Windows don't and therefore see extra "files". If this is true, really ancient floppies would exhibit the same problem. The patch is against 2.4.19, but should apply against 2.5 kernels without any real trouble. Thanks, Frodo -- Frodo Looijaard PGP key and more: http://huizen.dds.nl/~frodol Defenestration n. (formal or joc.): The act of removing Windows from your computer in disgust, usually followed by the installation of Linux or some other Unix-like operating system.