15 March 2020, 16:34 | #1 |
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Mixing FFS/PFS/FAT partitions
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. |
15 March 2020, 17:55 | #2 |
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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.
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15 March 2020, 18:07 | #3 |
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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. |
15 March 2020, 19:05 | #4 |
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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. |
16 March 2020, 00:27 | #5 |
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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? |
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