Filesystem links on a FAT32 formatted storage

Question

I know FAT32, as well as FAT16/12 neither support symbolic links nor hard-links. However I came up with this idea:

The FAT specification describes that every file is associated with a directory-entry. In my understanding, one could say that a file-entry in a directory somehow or other points to the file's content.

So, how can I define two directory-entries which point to the same file-content? Or, what could prevent me from doing so?

Use case: I have a USB mass storage device for my car radio, and I want to use directories as playlists since the radio software doesn't support playlists. So it isn't important to me how Windows behaves when doing this.

Answer 1

This should work for simple issues. I.e. it works as a hack / workaround and I don't know what happens if you rename / move / remove files. So, you should not do this on your main hdd.

I edited the directory-entries manually using a hex editor. I modified clusters as well as file-sizes and successfully faked hardlinks. My car-radio and even Windows (7, 64Bit) have no problems with playing back the original and "hard-linked" mp3-Files I used.

When I'm opening the device again in the hex-editor none of my modifications are changed back (See chkdsk issue in answer #1 - but as far as I know chkdsk has to be started manually, anyways.

Answer 2

What you are talking about ("two directory-entries which are pointing to the same file-content") are hard links. chkdsk will report them as cross-links and break them, "repairing" the files (in fact making the copies).