OSX Snow Leopard – How to Create a Virtual Disk/Filesystem

I had some thoughts that have been very hard to prove as I searched and searched, but I suspect that those drives are of a type that Windows does not poll for low disk space.

This is for Windows 7, but surely many of the same rules apply for XP, so I quote:

Windows 7 does not poll Zip Drives, Floppies or any other “removable” media drives.

http://support.Microsoft.com/kb/2547929

My first thought is that it is treating them as one of those types of drives, in particular, as a removable media type drive.

As a note, I confirmed that it will indeed report low space regardless of whether it is NTFS or FAT32, so that is not an issue.

The simple answer is no. The long answer is...

NTFS does store filenames in a case-sensitive way (NTFS can have README.txt and readme.txt in the same directory), and even the Windows filemanager can internally manage case-sensitive requests to filenames via the NtOpenFile / NtCreateFile syscalls.

Unfortunately for you, the Win32 function CreateFile (used everywhere including by fopen) will internally call NtCreateFile using the OBJ_CASE_INSENSITIVE flag which will mean that all applications which use CreateFile will see your case-sensitive filesystem case-insensitively. In practise this means that all applications will see your filesystem in a case-insensitive way regardless of whether your filesystem is actually case-sensitive under the hood.

The only way I can think for you to practically force case-sensitivity is to write a filter-driver which will remove the OBJ_CASE_INSENSITIVE flag from the incoming syscall requests which will then allow NTFS, EXT2 or whatever internal filesystem you have to behave in their default, case-sensitive way.