Filesystem links on a FAT32 formatted storage

filesystems fat32 fat hardlink file-link
fishbone picture fishbone · Dec 28, 2010 · Viewed 29.3k times · Source

I know FAT32, as well as FAT16/12 neither support symbolic links nor hard-links. However I came up with this idea:

The FAT specification describes that every file is associated with a directory-entry. In my understanding, one could say that a file-entry in a directory somehow or other points to the file's content.

So, how can I define two directory-entries which point to the same file-content? Or, what could prevent me from doing so?

Use case: I have a USB mass storage device for my car radio, and I want to use directories as playlists since the radio software doesn't support playlists. So it isn't important to me how Windows behaves when doing this.

Answer

Eugene Mayevski 'Callback picture Eugene Mayevski 'Callback · Dec 28, 2010

What you are talking about ("two directory-entries which are pointing to the same file-content") are hard links. chkdsk will report them as cross-links and break them, "repairing" the files (in fact making the copies).

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