Rob's Blog

Case sensitive
20th Mar 2006 00:03

So, my iRiver seemed to be playing up. I deleted all the songs and copied them back on, and for some reason it was missing out whole directories. I reformatted, defragged, ran scandisk and so on . . . everything seemed to be fine. The problem? Turned out it was Linux. When I copied my files from an NTFS partition to an EXT3 partition I didn't realise the consequences of migrating to a case sensitive file system. In certain folders I'd somehow (not quite sure how) ended up with both a Folder.jpg and a folder.jpg file... for these folders when I tried to copy them from their home EXT3 partition to the FAT32 formatting of my iRiver Ubuntu - rather than throwing up an error message (grrrr!!) - just decided not to copy the folders. I used my newfound knowledge of regex to remove the offending files, and voila - everything works fine. And I only wasted about 8 hours trying to find out what the problem was ;) I've now created a 100gb FAT32 partition for music, video and photos to try and avoid such problems in the future. Still, on the plus side I learnt a hell of a lot about 'diff', 'fsck', 'mount' and 'umount' - a few new Linux commands successfully under my belt.