Filesystem panic, bad FAT

[Andrew Mickish <mickish cmu edu>]

A couple of weeks ago, people suggested that the following errors in
my system log indicated that my FAT partition had been improperly defined,
and that I should fdisk it and rebuild the partition.

	Apr 30 04:02:02 k9 kernel: Filesystem panic (dev 03:01, mounted on 03:0b:4017)
	Apr 30 04:02:02 k9 kernel:   FAT error
	Apr 30 04:02:02 k9 kernel: Directory 4411274: bad FAT
	Apr 30 04:02:03 k9 kernel: Filesystem panic (dev 03:01, mounted on 03:0b:4017)
	Apr 30 04:02:03 k9 kernel:   FAT error
	Apr 30 04:02:03 k9 kernel: Directory 8035201: bad FAT

I have exactly the same problem with another machine that I built with
a FAT partition in exactly the same way.  I created the partition during
the RedHat installation procedure with fdisk, at the same time that I
created all the other partitions.

Here is what 'fdisk' shows me about my disk:

	[root k9 /root]# fdisk
	Using /dev/hda as default device!

	Command (m for help): p

	Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1024 cylinders
	Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

	   Device Boot    Start      End   Blocks   Id  System
	/dev/hda1             1       64   514048+   6  DOS 16-bit >=32M
	/dev/hda2   *        65     1024  7711200    5  Extended
	/dev/hda5   *        65       70    48163+  83  Linux native
	/dev/hda6            71      160   722893+  83  Linux native
	/dev/hda7           161      250   722893+  83  Linux native
	/dev/hda8           251      340   722893+  83  Linux native
	/dev/hda9           341      373   265041   83  Linux native
	/dev/hda10          374      389   128488+  82  Linux swap
	/dev/hda11          390      402   104391   83  Linux native
	/dev/hda12          403      663  2096451   83  Linux native


It is a 9Gb disk with a couple of unallocated gigs left at the end.
The FAT partition is 500Mb, and boots to DOS fine.  The Start and End
fields look OK to me.  Is there anything wrong here, or somewhere else
I should look for a problem?

When my FAT partition is mounted at /dos, I can 'ls' files there, but if
I do something like 'ls -R' then I start getting the spew of errors
in my system log.  It seems to me that there is something corrupt about
the partition besides its size definition.

What else could I check about how the partition might be corrupted?

Thanks,

--Andrew Mickish
  mickish cmu edu