"mounting vfat case sensitive is plain wrong and dangerous"

[Soul Singin']

This post is based on: Debian Bug #501339.

Once upon a time, I had an army of USB flash drives. Today, I have a cemetery filled with fallen soldiers. Their cause of death remains a mystery, but I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that they were mounted case-sensitive.

I've noticed that placing the following line in my /etc/fstab file:

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/dev/sda1       /media/sda1     auto    rw,user,noauto,exec  0       0

and running:

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mkdir /media/sda1

mounts a FAT-formatted USB flash drive case-insensitive:

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[ Thu 13-Aug-2009 21.11 XXXX ] ~ $ mount /dev/sda1
[ Thu 13-Aug-2009 21.11 XXXX ] ~ $ mount
...
/dev/sda1 on /media/sda1 type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=XXXX)
[ Thu 13-Aug-2009 21.11 XXXX ] ~ $ 
[ Thu 13-Aug-2009 21.11 XXXX ] ~ $ cd /media/sda1
[ Thu 13-Aug-2009 21.11 XXXX ] sda1 $ 
[ Thu 13-Aug-2009 21.11 XXXX ] sda1 $ echo hello > hello.txt
[ Thu 13-Aug-2009 21.11 XXXX ] sda1 $ echo hello > Hello.txt
bash: Hello.txt: File exists
[ Thu 13-Aug-2009 21.11 XXXX ] sda1 $ 
[ Thu 13-Aug-2009 21.11 XXXX ] sda1 $ ls -l
total 4
-rwxr-xr-x 1 XXXX XXXX 6 2009-08-13 21:11 hello.txt
[ Thu 13-Aug-2009 21.12 XXXX ] sda1 $ 

For those of you who prefer to let KDE or GNOME (or something else) automatically mount a USB flash drive upon insertion, fear not! It will still mount automatically. The difference is that the /etc/fstab line above will mount your FAT-formatted flash drives case insensitive (as it should be!).

Enjoy!
- Soul Singin'
.

[craigevil]

Thanks for posting this.

Came across a 8gb flash drive that was less than a year old that had this issue.