Moving devices from 98SE to XP and back again

Igor Pechtchanski pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
Tue Oct 7 22:51:00 GMT 2003


On Tue, 7 Oct 2003 fergus@bonhard.uklinux.net wrote:

> This is a file-handling problem that I have noticed in other contexts too.
>
> Windows 98/SE is good (faultless?) at preserving upper case and lower case
> in filenames, whether long or short or with spaces. However, I have noticed
> when moving devices back and forth between 98 and XP machines, that XP is
> nothing like as careful, and that in circumstances that I have not yet
> precisely identified, one can suddenly lose this distinction when all 8.3
> filenames that had been all lower case become all upper case.
>
> Mixtures of case in filenames are preserved (libW11.dll stays libW11.dll,
> XWin.exe stays XWin.exe) and so are long file names (cygcrypto.dll stays
> cygcrypto.dll) but in all other cases (less.exe, cygwin1.dll) the change
> takes place (LESS.EXE, CYGWIN1.DLL).
>
> In an important respect this does not matter at all: Windows is daft enough
> not to know there is a difference and so it does not notice it when seeking
> and reading a file. Eg when starting Cygwin it does not matter that
> cygwin1.dll has become CYGWIN1.DLL. But: Cygwin does notice, and once there,
> ls cyg* presents a quite different response to ls CYG* (for instance). So
> this is a very nasty occurrence, once it has happened.
>
> I appreciate that the list is well populated with traffic on the subject of
> long and short filenames but I have not found the answers to the following:
> (1) when moving devices between different OS as described, is there a
> particular class of activity that will cause this transformation? (Maybe
> something to do with pursuing activities in a XP Command Prompt window, but
> I can't confirm this.) (2) assuming the activity is a useful one to be
> continued, is there some protection that can be implemented against the
> transformation taking place?
>
> Thank you.
> Fergus

<http://www.thenakedpc.com/cgi-bin/annoyarchive.pl?read=3027>.  You'll
need to do this on the Win98 machine before copying to XP.  Hope this
helps.
	Igor
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