Mounting FFS hard drive partition under K1.3

I've got an A1000 with a A590 plugged in which, in turn, contains a 250Meg SCSI hard drive.

The hard drive is partitioned in 2 FFS partitions, one bootable for WB stuff and one non bootable for work stuff.

I'm using Kickstart & WB 1.3 (34.5 and 34.28 respectively) and even though I seemed to remember that you couldn't boot of an FFS partition, it seems to work fine. I can boot and access both partition under WB.

Only issue is, something seem to doubly mount both partitions. I see two icons (one called Workbench, one called Work) but I also see two others called dh0:A and dh1:A which seem to be something trying to mount FFS partitions but failing (you get those kind of names when you insert and FFS floppy disk which is not supported under 1.3.

Any ideas?

By the way, the correct name that appears on the two 'bad' drives is DH0OSA and DH1OSA.

[RetroGeek]

The Commodore A590 is basically a Commodore A2091 SCSI controller that was designed to plug into the Amiga 500s side expansion port. So, an A2091 disk or HDTools in Workbench should see the drive and allow you to format it.

Because it is a small hard drive you will have to low-level format it first. Then verify the sectors and partition the drive. Then reboot and do the high-level format (Workbench). The first SCSI device (your boot hard drive) should be set for 0, not 6. Make sure that the whole SCSI chain is properly terminated. If you are just using a hard drive then make sure that it is terminated. The older SCSI I/II hard drives use resister packs for termination. Newer SCSI hard drives have a jumper to set termination on or off. I hope this helps you.

Thanks for the reply. I have the hard drive formatted and partitioned using the a590 setup disk. The Setup disk also installed a copy of WB1.3 on the first partition.

As mentionned in my original post, both of these partitions are FFS and are totally visible and useable (my A1000 even boots off the first one no problem). I also see two icons on the WB desktop for each partition (One called Workbench and one called Work).

My problem is that i ALSO see two icons for bad mounts of the SAME partitions. The same kind that you see when you insert a floppy which is in FFS under 1.3 (which is not supported). The name of those icons is DH0:dosA and DH1:dosA which indicates that it can't mount those....but in fact they are already mounted and working.

To verify my assumptions I reformatted the drive in OFS or a combination of one OFS/one FFS partition and every OFS partition mounts fine (and appears only once on my desktop). Every time I have an FFS partition in the mix it 'seems' to mount twice (one working icon and one 'DOSA' non-working one).

I hope this is clearer

[thomas]

I don't think you are on the right trace here. Workbench never shows two icons of the same partition. You can see *either* "Workbench" *or* "DH0:DOS" but never both.

I suppose the icons "DH0:DOS" correspond to completely different partitions.

Please open a shell window and enter info. It should give you an output like this:

Mounted disks:
Unit      Size    Used    Free Full Errs   Status   Name
DH0:      Not a DOS disk
DF1:      No disk present
DF0:      No disk present
RAM:        4K       8       0 100%   0  Read/Write RAM DISK
HD0:       81M   29621  133705  18%   0  Read/Write Festplatte

Volumes available:
RAM DISK [Mounted]
Festplatte [Mounted]

As you can see there is a partition "HD0" which corresponds to the volume "Festplatte". And there is "DH0" which is an additional partition, not related to "Festplatte".

You now have to track down where the "DH0" entry was created. It could be a bug in the partitioning tool or in the controller's firmware.

You should use HDInsttool to check whether your partitioning tool has created additional partitions.

But it could as well be that you mixed the setup routines for Kick 1.2 and Kick 1.3. With Kick 1.2 you need to boot from floppy disk and use mountlists to mount the HDD parttions. Check devs:mountlist if DH0 and DH1 are mentioned there. If so check s:startup-sequence and s:startupii if there are mount commands for DH0 and DH1 and if they are there, remove them.

Thanks for the suggestion Thomas, here's the output of info:

Mounted disks:
Unit      Size    Used    Free Full Errs   Status   Name
DF1:      No disk present
DF0:      No disk present
RAM:        2K       4       0 100%   0  Read/Write RAM DISK
DH0:       28M   3950  53048  6%   0  Read/Write Workbench
DH1:      235M   28923  442325  6%   0  Read/Write Home

Volumes available:
RAM DISK [Mounted]
Home [Mounted]
Workbench [Mounted]

I don't have any way to get HDInsttool to the A1000 but I use HDToolBox which ships with the A590.

No Mount commands in StartupII, Startup-Sequence and user-startup that I can see.

It's definitely tied to the FFS partitions somehow though. For example if I format my first partition in OFS and my second in FFS, only DH1:dosA appears on the desktop (and vice-versa if I do it the other way).

[thomas]

That's really strange. Which version of FFS do you use ? (Enter version dh0: in a shell window).

What happens if you left-click the DH0:DOSA icon and select initialize from the menu ?

It seems like under 1.3 'version' doesn't take any parameters, I keep getting Errors in Open no matter what I point it to (dh0:, dh1:, df0: with an OFS disk in, etc...). My amigados reference doesn't mention any parameters either.

If I try initialize, it offers me the GUI prompt 'Please insert disk to be initialized in drive dh0:'. Which is interesting because if I try to initialize 'Workbench' (which 'should' be dh0: too) I get the "Ok to initialize volume Workbench?" prompt instead.

[RetroGeek]

The Commodore A590 was not really designed to work with the Amiga 1000. It was designed to work with the Amiga 500. If you insist on using an Amiga 1000, then get yourself a hard drive that was designed to work with it. Supra made a very nice hard drive system for the Amiga 1000.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by RetroGeek

The Commodore A590 was not really designed to work with the Amiga 1000.

So what? Technically there is no difference except the expansion slot is rotated 180 degrees. (looks ugly but works)

Toni is spot on. The A1000 has the exact same Zorro slot on the side, just rotated 180deg (so my A590 is facing backwards).

Apart from that it's exactly the same as an A500's slot and has nothing to do with my problem (but thanks for the suggestion

I used to have the same setup back in 89 and never had a problem like the one I have right now (although I can't remember if I formatted the partitions FFS at the time)

[RetroGeek]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

So what? Technically there is no difference except the expansion slot is rotated 180 degrees. (looks ugly but works)

If it works, then why is he having problems. The Amiga 1000 has a slightly different chipset then all other Amiga models. For instance, the Amiga 1000 has a skinny, 256K Agnus chip. The Amiga 2000 / 500 have a 512k to 2 meg Fat Agnus. The Amiga 1000s electronics is slightly different then the Amiga 500s. Because of this, some hardware designed for the Amiga 500s side expansion slot will not work with the Amiga 1000.

The best hard drive system for the Amiga 1000 was made by Supra.

[thomas]

If it works, then why is he having problems.

He does not have problems. Not those problems you are expecting. All parts you mentioned are pieces of hardware. But he does not have a hardware problem. The HDD spins up, the controller is recognised by expansion.library, partitions are mounted automatically and he can read and write data from/to the hdd. So the hardware is completely fine.

What we are facing is a software problem. Actually it is not even a problem but only a cosmetical glitch. Partitions are shown twice, once as usable drive and once as unformatted.

As he has no way to get testing programs to the A1000 and no way to get diagnosis data from the A1000 to another computer, we can only guess which part of the software is causing it. Could be a bug in the controller's firmware or in the Kickstart or in Workbench itself.

Yeah, please let's not turn this into a "which HD is the best" flame war... All HD are great... The SCSI drive that's in my 590 is actually one from a Supra drive because the controller for that was dead when I got it off eBay.

Anyway, back to my issue

I did have a similar setup working fine back in the days. It had and IDE drive instead of a SCSI one, it probably was not the exact same version of Kickstart and Workbench.

I'm going to try plug an IDE drive in there and format that in FFS. See if i get the same problem.

Does anyone remember if it was ok to boot off an FFS HD partition or did the first partition need to be OFS?

[TheCorfiot]

Just a thought

Some SCSi drives can appear on more than 1 Logical Unit number "LUN" at the same address.

Check your jumper setting inside the A590 (J5 on the A2091) to disable LUN (factory setting).



Just checked... It's the DIP switches on the rear - It's Switch 2 OFF for LUN disable

[rkauer]

If hardware-wise fails, just put a software patch!

IIRC, there is a little app on aminet to show/hide volumes and icons! Grab and install it and you are set.

OFS disks will function in the A1000. So it's a matter of using another Amiga to toss the application to the A1000's HD.

Check if you have another amigan near you or ask for an OFS-formatted disk with the program.

Originally Posted by Dids

No Mount commands in StartupII, Startup-Sequence and user-startup that I can see.

Just to make sure, did you also check the file devs:Mountlist?

[Anubis]

While setting OS 1.3 for MiSTer FPGA, I used WinUAE to setup HD Image and planned to format it, install OS and couple of programs and move all of that to FPGA once done.

For WinUAE to work with RDB image, I use A590 emulation (Commodore) and everything works great, except - once I format disks with FFS it shows the same ghost icons as OP had on his A1000. (see image) I was able to install OS on DH0 partition.

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I also changed partition device names to UDH0 and UDH1 to see if that causes issues due to controller checking it as DH0, but that did not change much, except showing now UDH0OSA etc.



If I check info, here is what I get



After Toni suggested that it might be too new FFS, I tried 4-5 different ones and was not able to find one that will not show those ghost icons. Attached is MountList from 1.3.3, which I used to format and install OS.

Any ideas what might be issue and cause those glitches?

[Anubis]

LOL, it took me forever, but eventually I did figure it out.

I had to use A590 setup disk, DriveDefentitions and update File System to FFS for both partitions, as well go under Advanced Options and update File System for each partition. As soon as that was done, ghost icons disappeared.

Since I am not using ueahf, FastFileSystem is not needed when mounting HDF file in WinUAE.