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.


Add comment

New comments can no longer be posted on this entry.

Conferences

I speak at and organize conferences around Open Source in general and PostgreSQL in particular.

Upcoming

PGConf.EU 2026
Oct 20-23, 2026
Valencia, Spain
FOSDEM PGDay 2027
Jan 28-31, 2027
Brussels, Belgium
Nordic PGDay 2027
Mar 16, 2027
Stockholm, Sweden

Past

PGDay Lowlands 2026
Sep 10, 2026
Utrecht, Netherlands
PGDay.UK 2026
Sep 8, 2026
London, UK
pgconf.dev 2026
May 19-22, 2026
Vancouver, Canada
pgDay.paris 2026
Mar 26, 2026
Paris, France
Nordic PGDay 2026
Mar 24, 2026
Helsinki, Finland
More past conferences