PFS3 file system and Tornado angst

[Angus]

Originally Posted by thomas

This message appears if you point DiskValid to the volume rather than the device. If you named both the volume and the device the same, then rename the volume and use the device name (which should now be unique).
.

Thanks Thomas.


I just had another thought...... I may not have properly understood what people have been saying, but in Tornado, I don't use the WHDLoad Quit key because the default one conflicts with one of the flight-sims keybopard bindings. I exit the game by using the original Quit function from the game. Might that be the problem - assuming the game tried to save on Exit, and PFS3 is not quick enough to manage that?

[thomas]

No, you didn't understand that right.

The problem is while the game is running. As an originally floppy-based game it kills the OS and used its own routines to access the hardware. This includes the floppy hardware. I.e. if it writes something to disk, it keeps the OS dead and uses its own means to write to floppy disk.

Now the WHDLoad slave changed the game code to write to harddisk instead. Here hardware banging is not possible. So the slave has to wake up the OS and use DOS routines to write to a file and then set the OS asleep again. But the OS does multitasking. That means DOS sends the data to another task and returns to the caller. The other task write the data to disk in the background. This means the slave must not kill the OS too early. But it cannot tell when the data finally has been written completely. That's where WriteDelay comes into account. It tells the slave how long it should wait so that the harddisk definitely has finished its work. If it is too short the background task is interrupted in the middle of its work.

If you quit the game, the OS wakes up ultimately. You cannot quit the game too early.

It is more likely that the game code does something bad to the memory used by the OS while the OS is sleeping. In this situation the game has full control and might not care about allocated vs. unallocated memory. It treats everything as its own.

[daxb]

The default WHDLoad behaviour is that writes to HD are done on Quit (key) if you don't use http://whdload.de/docs/en/opt.html#NoWriteCache

[paraj]

I have no idea what the problem might be, but whdload also writes when you exit through other means (doesn't have to be the quit key), at least when it's not an abnormal exit (but maybe there as well, just haven't tested that). I can change settings and use the "exit button" in the game and they are persisted just fine. (Only commenting on the AGA version)

Tornado is fairly system friendly, and doesn't take over the machine. It uses DOS for all its file operations. In the whdload version this goes through the kickfs (virtual HD), but the write cache thing still applies of course.

I can't rule out that there are bugs where the game will trash memory outside WHDLoad, but by default the MMU (if present) is used to guard against that, and I haven't seen any such problems during testing.

[Angus]

Originally Posted by paraj

I can't rule out that there are bugs where the game will trash memory outside WHDLoad, but by default the MMU (if present) is used to guard against that, and I haven't seen any such problems during testing.

Thanks, Paraj. No MMU on PiStorm though, right?


I'm very grateful for all the knowlegable comments, guys. I'm still unsure what to do.


I know the partition is broken - but presumably it might just be a faulty SD card?


It's a 3GB partition by the way.


Here's what I think I'll do:


Reformat the partition (still PFS3)
Copy back my stuff to it (mostly WHDLoad games)
Double the WriteDelay on Tornado to 300 (6 seconds)
See how that goes.


If that doesn't work.....
Maybe convert the partition to FFS and perhaps split it into 2 partitions.


Does that sound sensible, or at least not completely daft?




P.S. Thanks to Don, Toni, Malko, Thomas, Paraj, daxb and everyone else for their help.

[Angus]

I've now had problems on my boot partition, SDH0:

I don't know if this is Tornado related or not, but after the problems appeared on my WHDLoad partition (SDH1 I moved Tornado across on to my boot partition. This is FFS, unlike the rest which are PFS3.

I have played a couple of games of Tornado with it there. Then yesterday I got an error requester, so I used Quarterback Tools. This is the error log I got. It does feature Tornado, but I have no idea if that implies that it is the problem or not.

* Starting to analyze and repair disk "SDH0"
* Block scan started Jun 27, 2024 at 2:04:59 PM
No bad blocks were found.
* Block scan completed Jun 27, 2024 at 2:09:40 PM
* File scan started Jun 27, 2024 at 2:09:40 PM

Drawer: SDH0:L
Entry:
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:L
Entry:
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:L
Entry: KingCON-handler
Error: File ext header checksum error
Action: Checksum was recalculated

Drawer: SDH0:L
Entry: KingCON-handler
Error: File ext header type is bad
Action: File was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:L
Entry: KingCON-handler
Error: File size error
Action: Error was corrected

Drawer: SDH0:L
Entry:
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Temp
Entry: v³_v³_v³_v³_v
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Tools/HDTools
Entry:
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Tools/HDTools
Entry: „³
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Tools/HDTools
Entry: BRU
Error: File ext header checksum error
Action: Checksum was recalculated

Drawer: SDH0:Tools/HDTools
Entry: BRU
Error: File ext header type is bad
Action: File was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Tools/HDTools
Entry: BRU
Error: File size error
Action: Error was corrected

Drawer: SDH0:Tools/HDTools
Entry: HDBackup
Error: File ext header checksum error
Action: Checksum was recalculated

Drawer: SDH0:Tools/HDTools
Entry: HDBackup
Error: File ext header type is bad
Action: File was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Tools/HDTools
Entry: HDBackup
Error: File size error
Action: Error was corrected

Drawer: SDH0:X
Entry: p³_p³_p³_p³_p
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:X
Entry: o³_o³_o³_o³_o
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:X
Entry:
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:X
Entry: u³_u³_u³_u³_u
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Games/Tornado
Entry:
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Games/Tornado/DATA-AGA
Entry: FLIGHT
Error: File ext header checksum error
Action: Checksum was recalculated

Drawer: SDH0:Games/Tornado/DATA-AGA
Entry: FLIGHT
Error: File ext header type is bad
Action: File was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Games/Tornado/DATA-AGA
Entry: FLIGHT
Error: File size error
Action: Error was corrected

Drawer: SDH0:Libs
Entry:
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Libs
Entry: xadmaster.library
Error: File ext header checksum error
Action: Checksum was recalculated

Drawer: SDH0:Libs
Entry: xadmaster.library
Error: File ext header type is bad
Action: File was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Libs
Entry: xadmaster.library
Error: File size error
Action: Error was corrected

Drawer: SDH0:Libs
Entry: t³_
t³_t
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Libs
Entry: y³_
y³_y
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Libs/XAD
Entry:
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Libs/XAD
Entry:
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Libs/XAD
Entry: n³_n³
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Libs/XAD
Entry:
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Libs/XAD
Entry: ‚³_‚³_
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Libs
Entry: z³_z³
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Libs
Entry:
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:Libs
Entry:
Error: Unknown secondary type
Action: Bad entry was deleted

Drawer: SDH0:
Entry:
Error: Bitmap contents incorrect
Action: Bitmap was reconstructed

Major problems found: 32
Minor problems found: 11
Total files processed: 10,779
Bad files deleted: 0
Total links processed: 0
Bad links deleted: 0
Total drawers processed: 0
Bad drawers detected: 22
Unreadable blocks found: 0
Volume status: Major problems corrected. Volume usable.

[Don_Adan]

Always better is use small partition for WHDload saving.
Dont must to move installed games.

Use SavePath from WHDLoad

https://whdload.de/docs/en/opt.html

Do you used WriteDelay ?
Im not expert, but these errors looks strange.
Maybe you have virus in your system?

You dont need to use QBTools if it was normal validation problem.
You need only a wait a few minutes, for 500MB partition.