As people with a Mk.7 device are probably aware, there's been a recurrent glitch which sometimes leaves the FAT filesystem of the partition exported over USBMS with the dirty bit set.
This makes most OS complain loudly about it when trying to mount it (and might cause the most stringent of 'em to refuse to mount it with write access).
I'm still not quite sure what's triggering the issue in the first place (but I figure Nickel is sometimes a bit hasty with how it unmounts the partition), but there are mechanisms in place to attempt to fix minor issues with the FAT partition automatically. These rely on the fsck tool from dosfstools. Unfortunately, like most of the sysroot, the version Kobo ships is *hilariously* old. So much so, that it doesn't actually know how to deal with the dirty bit.
Which means the existing fail-safe mechanisms are powerless to "fix" this issue.
I stumbled onto this entirely by chance (c.f., this post for more details), but the good news is that replacing that old binary with a recent version should take care of the problem (well, not the root cause, of course, but at least the built-in "fix" will now actually work).
So, here it is, in the form of a custom update package (i.e., a KoboRoot tarball), which you'll find inside the attached ZIP. As usual, put it (the tgz, not the zip) in the .kobo folder to install it.
----
fsck.fat -> dosfsck: DOSFSTools, c.f., individual source files for detailed Copyright attribution,
Released under the GNU General Public License version 3+ (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html),
(https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools)
This makes most OS complain loudly about it when trying to mount it (and might cause the most stringent of 'em to refuse to mount it with write access).
I'm still not quite sure what's triggering the issue in the first place (but I figure Nickel is sometimes a bit hasty with how it unmounts the partition), but there are mechanisms in place to attempt to fix minor issues with the FAT partition automatically. These rely on the fsck tool from dosfstools. Unfortunately, like most of the sysroot, the version Kobo ships is *hilariously* old. So much so, that it doesn't actually know how to deal with the dirty bit.
Which means the existing fail-safe mechanisms are powerless to "fix" this issue.
I stumbled onto this entirely by chance (c.f., this post for more details), but the good news is that replacing that old binary with a recent version should take care of the problem (well, not the root cause, of course, but at least the built-in "fix" will now actually work).
So, here it is, in the form of a custom update package (i.e., a KoboRoot tarball), which you'll find inside the attached ZIP. As usual, put it (the tgz, not the zip) in the .kobo folder to install it.
----
fsck.fat -> dosfsck: DOSFSTools, c.f., individual source files for detailed Copyright attribution,
Released under the GNU General Public License version 3+ (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html),
(https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools)