strange things: a) sticky vfat

[schnobs@babylon-kino.de]

Hello,

I had some strange things happening to me the past
few days, while installing on a box pieced together
from medieval-to-ancient hardware.

First: sticky vfat.
one disk was ripped from a windows machine: 500MB vfat.
I created a ext2 filesystem using cfdisk & mke2fs.
Next, I had plenty of errors that file permissions couldn't be
set etc. 
It took me quite some time, and a friend suggesting a look
at /etc/mtab to figure out that although I had by the time
run mke2fs and e2fsck several times, the disk was still auto-
mounted as vfat.
No wonder with the permissions....
To make matters worse, when telling mount that this was,
in fact, an ext2 filesystem, it would report an error and
suggest to run e2fsck -- iow, the disk was mounted read-only
at boottime.
I eventually got rid of it by creating and using swap space
on the disk, then repartitioning as ext2. Now it works.

Still, I wonder why vfat was so persistent. Does anyone know?  

cu,
Schnobs