Gimli (Ed) has spent much time trying to debug his new FatX drivers (many thanks to his excellent work - without him, we would never have progressed anywhere with regards to kernel 2.6! Excellent work Ed!) and we have concluded that there is either some bug we cannot see or (more likely) the 2.4 fatx drivers were bugged. I was given a forum link by a couple of people which pointed to a post on xbox-scene stating that the 2.4 FatX drivers don't write to FatX correctly (a bit is not set correctly). This would make sense as I can run with 2.6 perfectly (editing files on E:, making new files etc...) but then when I boot back to 2.4, make some file changes, then go back to 2.6 the files appear to be corrupt!

This poses a problem. Using magic will almost certainly brick your system (unless straight after running magic you backup your E: partition, then format it, then transfer it all back...). However, I refuse to let the mistakes of the past halt future progress - so I'm going to open magic after I run a final test. Theres now a lovely big warning saying your version of Gentoox is now deprecated ;) As you might have guessed... this means I'm working on Pro v2.0 and Home v4.0 as I'm typing this (this is a pretty major change so warrants the big version number change).

I would like anyone who tries upgrading to post their experiences here.

Sorry that this solution isn't very elegant, but its the only way I can see it happening... it's going to be a long weekend.

*Status (version, status)*
Resctoox-1.7: (Complete)
Stardust-*.*: (Complete)
Sparkle-1.5: (Complete)
Pro-2.0: (Complete)
Home-4.0: (Complete)
MCE-2.0: (In progress)

*Update*
Magic's doors are open again. Use at your own risk. You may need to run `emerge mozilla-firefox` after running magic to reinstall it.

*Update 2*
While I'm making such a massive change, I've decided to implement NPTL into Gentoox (see info here). This should make things ever so slightly faster and hopefully futureproof Gentoox for a little while longer. This change will NOT be implemented via magic, but only via the new versions of Gentoox which will be released shortly (hey - thats an incentive to upgrade!)

*Update 3*
Run into problems. The fatx driver for 2.6 is UBER slow:

ext3:
Xbox tmp # time dd if=/dev/zero of=./zero bs=1024k count=500
500+0 records in
500+0 records out

real 0m20.611s

FatX:
Pro e # time dd if=/dev/zero of=./zero bs=1024k count=500
500+0 records in
500+0 records out

real 3m0.907s

So FatX is 9x slower than ext3 at the moment which is just wrong!

*Update 4*
Gimli seems to think the problem is inherited from the Fat driver which this driver is based upon. Therefore there may not be an immediate solution to the problem - so I'm going ahead with the releases. If a fix turns up in the mean time, I'll implement it.