Mixing FFS/PFS/FAT partitions

[G4DDS]

I have an IDE to SD adapter installed in my A1200 and can quite successfully setup a 16Gb SD card with a mixture of FFS and PFS partitions and format them etc. no problems.

I have taken a blank 32GB card and with the help of the internet I have created a 1000Mb FAT32 partition using my laptop and diskpart:

So, I open a command prompt with administrator privileges and type DiskPart.

In DiskPart type:

list disk
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary align=1024 size=1000
format fs=fat32 quick
exit

I then rename the the FAT formatted partition SHARE.

I then plug the SD card into the Amiga and boot off workbench 3.1 disk, copy the fat95 file handler to RAM and assign L: to RAM (temporarily while trying things out) and then mount the FAT partition using the following mountlist (created by giggledisk with a few tweaks by me):

GGD0:
FileSystem = L:fat95
Device = scsi.device
Unit = 0
BlockSize = 512
Surfaces = 1
SectorsPerBlock = 1
BlocksPerTrack = 1
Reserved = 0
PreAlloc = 0
Interleave = 0
MaxTransfer = 0x0001FE00
Mask = 0x7FFFFFFE
LowCyl = 0
HighCyl = 0
Buffers = 50
BufMemType = 1
StackSize = 16384
Priority = 10
GlobVec = -1
DosType = 0x46415401
Activate = 1
Mount = 1
/* Bootable = FALSE */
#

The FAT partition SHARE is successfully mounted and appears on the workbench screen and I can access it and copy files to/from it on both PC and Amiga.

So, now the bit that has me flumoxed. With the SD card containing the FAT partition I need to add an Amiga RDB and the fat95 file system so it will automount the partition.

I open up HDToolBox and obviously it doesn't know anything about the SD card so I go to the section where you read the config and define a new type (I will also point out I am using a patched 3.1 ROM with a later scsi.device version so >4GB accesses are fine). I save the changes to the disk and reboot but I have now lost the FAT partition as the Amiga RDB has overwritten the PC MBR (I assume). I thought the whole point of using an align=1024 in the diskpart setup on the PC was so that the PC MBR and Amiga RDB could co-exist together? I think I must be missing something obvious here but I just can't work it out.

I am sure once I have worked this bit out then adding the Amiga FFS and PFS partitions should be the same as what I have done before.

[demolition]

An MBR is always located at address 0, i.e. in sector 0 while an RDB can be moved to a higher address. Since you align the FAT partition @ 1024, it will leave a little room between the MBR and the partition, so if you can put the RDB here, I guess it should work. I'm not sure how you can make HDToolbox create an RDB at a higher offset - it probably uses 0 as default which will overwrite your MBR. Perhaps writing 'RDSK' @ 512 which is right after the MBR, would make HDToolbox find and use that one instead of creating a blank one @ 0.

[thomas]

You didn't RTFM, did you?

FAT95 comes with with a command line tool which does all you need. IIRC it's called boot95.

If you mounted the FAT partiton as GGD0 like you showed above, then you can enter

boot95 ggd0:

in a Shell window. It will create an RDB and store the fat95 module on the disk.

You should not add other Amiga partitions to that disk, though. I am not sure if HDToolbox will move the RDB back to sector 0 if you try to.

[G4DDS]

I briefly played with boot95 but I got an error (can't remember what it was) but this may have been before I tweaked the mountlist as initially the partition would not mount. I dod not try it after the partition was mounted.

I'll be honest I did have a very brief read of the readme but I thought boot95 was just to make floppies and partitions bootable which was overboard for me so I thought I was heading down the wrong route trying to use boot95.

I shall have another play. When I was googling I was lead to believe that you can add Amiga partitions after the FAT partition has been created. We shall see.

[G4DDS]

OK so a bit further with my test and I know have an SD card with a FAT95 partition and 2 PFS3 partitions. All partitions set to auto mount.

I have a kickstart switcher installed so I have been experimenting with kickstarts 1.3 and 3.1. Kickstart 3.1 and Workbench 3.1 booting from floppy all 3 partitions are mounted and are accessible.

But, with kickstart 1.3 (patched with scsi.device 43.45) and Workbench 1.3 booting from floppy only the 2 PFS3 partitions auto mount. Opening a shell and looking at the output from the assign command under devices it lists MSD0 (which is what I decided to call the device associated with the FAT partition).

Anyone any ideas why the FAT partition won't auto mount under kickstart 1.3? I notice in the readme that it says:

OS 1.3+ (OS 2.0+ for full functionality)

but nowhere could I find what functionality is missing under 1.3?