Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!pacbell!ames!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!phigate!philmds!leo
From: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Volume labels on hard drives
Message-ID: <1062@philmds.UUCP>
Date: 7 Aug 89 18:02:35 GMT
References: <15591@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Organization: Philips I&E DTS Eindhoven
Lines: 33

In article <15591@watdragon.waterloo.edu> swklassen@dahlia.waterloo.edu (Steven W. Klassen) writes:
|Here's a problem which I have never seen before.
|
|I screwed up in my download of emacs (I shall try it again soon) and
|somehow the download seems to have created a file which TOS thinks is
|a volume label.
    []
|Question for Atari:  How can something like this get there in
|the first place?

Using the Fattrib() call of GEMDOS you can make an ordinary file into a
volume label. It's even worse: you can make it into a directory that is
not really a directory (it doesn't have the . and .. entries, and you
can't put files into it, but it _looks_ like a directory, since it has
a 'mode' of 0x10).

Try and replay with:

      if (Fattrib(filename,1,mode) < 0) {
         fprintf(stderr,"%s: cannot set mode\n",filename);
      }

with mode set to 8 for a volume label, or to 16 for a directory.

	 Leo.

P.S. On a side note, all GEMDOS documentation I could get hold of says
about bit 5 of the mode (0x20), that it is used to indicate that a file
was successfully written to and closed. I have yet to encounter such a
file (hmm, doesn't that imply all writes failed ? 8-).  However, it is
possible to set this bit in the mode by hand (using Fattrib()).
Perhaps someone at Atari can say something sensible about the use of
this bit?