dosfstools

dosfstools is an open source and free collection of command-line utilities that allow users to easily and quickly create, label and check MS-DOS FAT filesystems on GNU/Linux operating systems.

At the moment, it comprises of the mkfs.fat, which is also known as mkfs.msdos or mkfs.vfat, fsck.fat, which also known as fsck.msdos or fsck.vfat, as well as the fatlabel command-line tools.

Getting started with dosfstools

To install and use the dosfstools tools in your GNU/Linux operating system, you must first download the latest version from Softoware, save the archive on a location of your choice, extract its contents and open a terminal emulator.

On the terminal window, use the ‘cd’ command to navigate to the location of the extracted archive files, and execute the ‘make’ command to compile the source code, follow by the ‘make install’ command as root or with sudo to install the program system wide.

Command-line options

Each of the aforementioned command comes with various command-line options. To see them, you must run each command with the ‘--help’ string. For example, the ‘fatlable’ command accepts two options, the device and the label.

The ‘fsck.fat’ command will help you to automatically repair a filesystem, list path names, perform a verification pass, use DOS codepage to decode short file names, make read-only boot sector checks, toggle the Atari filesystem format or salvage unused chains to files.

On the other hand, the ‘mkfs.fat’ command includes several command-line options that let users to access hidden sectors, backup boot sectors, access reserved sectors, as well as to specify the drive number, logical sector size, volume ID and name, and sectors per cluster.

Supported operating systems and availability

The software is distributed on several Linux operating systems, including Arch Linux, Debian, Dragora, Fedora, Gentoo, Sabayon, T2, and Ubuntu. The source code and access to the latest, bleeding-edge code (via GitHub), as well as detailed usage information can be found on the official homepage of the project.

What is new in this release:

• fatlabel did not recognize long file names and mistook long file name segments in the root directory for labels. This caused output of garbage when asked to print the label and damage to the root directory (loss of long file name after fsck) when used to set the label.
• A fsck.fat check introduced in 3.0.26 triggered use of uninitialized fields in the constructed root directory entry, which randomly caused the code checking file names to consider the empty "file name" of the root directory to be bad:
• $ /sbin/fsck.fat -y bad.img
• fsck.fat 3.0.26 (2014-03-07)
• Bad short file name ().
• Auto-renaming it.
• Renamed to
• bad.img: 14 files, 19388/403266 clusters
• And finally fsck.fat will not print the version string anymore every time the -v option is encountered.

What is new in version 3.0.27:

• fatlabel did not recognize long file names and mistook long file name segments in the root directory for labels. This caused output of garbage when asked to print the label and damage to the root directory (loss of long file name after fsck) when used to set the label.
• A fsck.fat check introduced in 3.0.26 triggered use of uninitialized fields in the constructed root directory entry, which randomly caused the code checking file names to consider the empty "file name" of the root directory to be bad:
• $ /sbin/fsck.fat -y bad.img
• fsck.fat 3.0.26 (2014-03-07)
• Bad short file name ().
• Auto-renaming it.
• Renamed to
• bad.img: 14 files, 19388/403266 clusters
• And finally fsck.fat will not print the version string anymore every time the -v option is encountered.

What is new in version 3.0.26:

• Fsck fixes errors on filesystems suffering from frequent power losses.

What is new in version 3.0.25:

• This release fixes fsck errors on 64-bit platforms.

What is new in version 3.0.24:

• Fixed dosfsck on big endian platforms.

What is new in version 3.0.23:

• This version corrects clustersize in order to fix issues with EFI System Partitions.

What is new in version 3.0.20:

• This version updates default sectors per cluster for FAT32.

What is new in version 3.0.19:

• This version fixes a segfault with fortify.

What is new in version 3.0.18:

• Proper naming for tools, and initial internationalization for man pages.

What is new in version 3.0.17:

• This version adds bugfixes in dosfslabel.