dosfsck "Unable to create unique name"

Question

I have an Archos 605 media player that seems to have become corrupted, so I'm trying to run fsck on it. It mounts as a FAT32 hard drive, so I ran

sudo dosfsck -a

and this is what I got:

dosfsck 3.0.7, 24 Dec 2009, FAT32, LFN There are differences between boot sector and its backup. Differences: (offset:original/backup) 65:03/00
Not automatically fixing this. Unable to create unique name

I suspect this means I'm screwed, but I'd appreciate any additional insight from someone who knows more about dosfsck than I do.

Answer 1

it sounds like the partition table is screwed up.

Fortunately there is a good linux tool to get it back working
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk

sudo apt-get install testdisk

the wiki contains a good guide for exactly your problem (recover fat32 partition)
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

Answer 2

Another solution I use:

fsck.vfat -r /dev/sdXn

I asked for use partition table backup (yes) and fix some clusters issue (I select no).

After that I rerun and fix Free cluster summary wrong. Next I run:

sudo dosfsck -w -l -a -v  /dev/sdXn

and it report that all ok!

See blog http://tech-vaults.blogspot.com/2011/10/fsckvfat-unable-to-create-unique-name.html