Case Sensitive vfat Thumbdrive

A couple of years ago I had some fun trying to figure out why a Thumbdrive would show filenames in the wrong case when mounted on a Linux machine. The question came up again today and is likely to be something which many people have been frustrated with in the past since all manner of USB hard drive devices use vfat as their partition type, the answer is:

When you mount the Thumbdrive as vfat you also need to specify shortname=[lower|win95|winnt|mixed]. As long as you specify the option "mixed" you will be able to maintain the correct capitalisation of the file name, see Chris' page:

http://www.homechris.net/index.php?item=050210_vfat_and_linux

Which kindly translates the key points of Torsten Scheck's article into English:

http://www.pro-linux.de/t_system/vfat-tipps.html


If you have any additional information about copying files to and from USB hard drives, or Thumbdrives, or MP3 players, then please leave a comment and let me know. If you have a question which you would like me to answer for free please send Ben Dash an email at ben.dash@gmail.com