On Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 09:16:05PM -0600, Peter Clark wrote: > The DiskOnKey partition is vfat (for cross-platform friendliness) and as far > as I understand matters, so long as I do not pull it out when the LED is > blinking rapidly (indicating data transfer), things should be fine. It's > basically flash memory, so aside from producing a small error message in > /var/log/messages, everything should be fine, right? Several tests haven't > resulted in any apparent corruption, but I'd like to know the more technical > side of the matter. Not familiar with the particular device, but I suspect you're partially correct: If you don't yank the plug out while the light is flashing, you should be safe from filesystem corruption. However, you'll still be susceptible to data loss, due to Linux's aggressive use of caching. To take a more easily-observable example, mount a floppy and save something to it. The save was probably completed almost instantly and quite possibly without the drive light even blinking. Now unmount the disk and wait while the cached data is actually written to the disk. The kernel will do the same thing with your DOK (unless it was mounted with the sync option - but, according to man mount, vfat ignores that option anyhow). Pull the floppy/DOK out after saving and before the kernel flushes the cache (either because you unmounted it or because the kernel wanted the cache space for something else), and you've just lost your data. -- When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists have already won. - reverius Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss