Hey, sorry for being so quiet for the last week… been busy.
Anyways, this is an interesting thing that happened to me a couple of weeks a go. My father bought some IPod nano thingy, I wouldn’t call it fake, but it has its advantages, radio, video and it even lets you delete files directly. Don’t get me wrong, I myself have the IPod nano which is really cool and prolly enough for most of my needs. But it is pretty expensive for a 2gb disk… oh well. So I was uploading songs to my father’s player. I was kinda lazy and decided to dump all songs in the root directory. After a while I got some message while trying to copy more songs, something like “Cannot create a file or directory”. It really annoyed me, I thought it might be something with the unicode file names, so I even tried to rename them to English alphabetic, just in case, but for no avail. At this moment, I wanted to give up. I was lacking any idea of what the problem might be. I almost thought the player is broken in some way and should be replaced…who knows.
The day after I sat with my friends from work, telling them this issue, no one had any idea what it might be. (And they are people like me who should have the faintest idea.. but nothing). So I told them that the only crazy idea I had in mind is that I can’t copy the songs because the player is formatted with FAT16. Which if you know or not, has a static size (of sectors) for the root directory. It means that if you allocate all these sectors, the root directory is full and you can’t continue creating a directory or copying a new file onto it. I even wrote a sample that shows how to parses FAT12 (FAT16 is easier to parse, because the size of a chain pointer is a whole 2 bytes, not 1.5…but both are piece of cakes compared to todays FS’s). Anyways, I got back home, formatted the player’s disk, for some reason it got crazy and did directory loops (recursively linking to the same directory) ??? I didn’t know what was going on. And to be honest, really didn’t care. Later on, I decided that now that I think I know what was the problem, I must create directories. Now, in FAT the sub-directories are not limited in any way (as opposed to the root directory). Creating directories and uploading songs, finally, I could easily upload songs and use the whole disk.
I bet that even the support team of the company who invented this player has no idea about this limitation. Funny enough I later noticed that is also supports FAT32 (which doesn’t suffer from the root directory limitation), but it seemed like the player got problems browsing the directories… aargh.
I think this is a really cool example that shows that your low-level knowledge might help you for real high-level stuff… Knowledge is power. :)
P.S: When saying “disk” as the player’s storage, I meant a flash storage…but it doesn’t really have anything with my post.
Here is more info about FAT16 vs FAT32.
I wouldn’t think of that myself, in terms of FS (FAT16/FAT32), i would probably just hook it up to the computer and check how much space i have left and start playing with it, create dirs, remove files and see the limit, cool idea, Knowledge is power!