Hi everyone,
I made some progress today. on linuxquestions.org someone suggested I try out the pclinuxos distro and I did (would not even boot on the machine I have been working with, but I did get it to boot on an older machine)
upon load the USB drives I put in auto-mounted. I tried the all uppercase test on it and it failed. Even remounting the USB device to another directory with the -o mount options failed.
then I thought... HMMMM.... what if I unmount all references to the USB stick and then re-try. -It worked! got an all uppercase filename. I may run into other problems but at least I got something to change! Happy!
I had wanted to try this in puppy but I could not unmount the initrd filesystem references to the USB device when booting from the USB device.
So to test puppy I booted in LIVE-CD mode, waited till it was up and put in my USB stick. mounted without flags and tested and it failed all uppercase filename test. AThen I unmounted and remounted with -o options mentioned above -- PRESTO!! all uppercase filenames worked agian!! -this time in puppy
So, the problem seems to be if there is already a mount reference to the device, new mounts to the same device have (at least some of) their options ignored. -I am a linux newbie so I don't know if this is standard linux MO or not.
Now... my question is, when booting off of the USB drive how do I get the initrd to let go of the USB stick mounts long enough for me to unmount/remount it? I get a device busy out of it when attempting. This may be a case of trying to lift oneself by one's bootstraps.
Perhaps a better question would be where can I change the mount options used when puppy mounts the initrd filesystems to the USB?
Thanks for the help. progress!
Puppy OS, vfat and all uppercase filenames
There's a lot to be said for just booting from the live-CD. Seems to be pretty trouble-free...
Assuming wonkocz manages to get around his latest sticking point, I'm still wondering about item #2 I found. After deleting the mixed-case file, why would the others be changed into it? Yes, a FAT filesystem thinks they are all the same, but why would there be any hint of the old file (or its name) left on the flash after I deleted it? And why would it assume the file needs to have its name changed? It is obviously capable of displaying all 3 kinds of filenames...
Well, maybe he isn't bothered with this particular "feature".
I wonder if this feature causes some of the difficulties seen with booting from USB flash.
Assuming wonkocz manages to get around his latest sticking point, I'm still wondering about item #2 I found. After deleting the mixed-case file, why would the others be changed into it? Yes, a FAT filesystem thinks they are all the same, but why would there be any hint of the old file (or its name) left on the flash after I deleted it? And why would it assume the file needs to have its name changed? It is obviously capable of displaying all 3 kinds of filenames...
Well, maybe he isn't bothered with this particular "feature".
I wonder if this feature causes some of the difficulties seen with booting from USB flash.