Windows interop weirdness plus torrent news

Hit something really weird in the windows vs linux interop department yesterday. Consider this:

Format a disk FAT32 in Windows. Mount it in linux, copy some files, reboot into Windows XP setup and proceed to install Windows. Works just fine.

Format a disk FAT32 in Linux. Mount in linux, copy some files. Reboot into Windows XP setup and proceed to install Windows. Works just fine - up to a point. After reboot (after Windows Setup has copied all files from the network to the local disk), the machine no longer boots - reports "Disk error" in the boot sector.

So much for interop. Solution? Do a disk image of a FAT32 partition formatted in Windows (empty - the image ends up around 10K for a 3Gb partition), and then restore that disk image from linux. Then it works. Hmmmm..

To make this post a little more PostgreSQL related, I got the new bittorrent stuff pushed out for www.postgresql.org yesterday. Now torrent downloads are automated, and they are automatically listed in the ftp browser. Should make it easier to find the torrents, and easier to make them track reality around new releases.


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