Formatting an hard drive (or a CF) with 2 different file systems

[liviux76]

Hello all,
maybe this is a silly question but I would like to know if it would be possible to format two partitions on a drive using different file systems.

On a real Amiga I would like to format a second hard drive with a "DH0:" partition using PFS3 and a "DH1:" partition using FFS but it seems that once prepared the drive this way on HDToolbox it disappears after a reboot and I have to prepare it again.

If I prepare the drive on HDToolbox using the same filesystem (either FFS or PFS3) for both partition it works.
Thanks for your attention!

[jPV]

There shouldn't be any problems using different filesystems for different partitions. I've had mixed fs layouts many times.

Is that second FFS partition under filesystem's size limits? Do both partitions disappear or just one? You still have both hard drives connected when this happens (if you only try with the new one, you might not have filesystems saved to its RDB too)? Does the first drive say it's changed and you haven't saved its settings?

[Daedalus]

Are you using an up-to-date device driver as well? The filesystems still need a new scsi.device (or whatever your interface uses) to be able to see beyond 4GB.

Another possibility is that you don't have the correct version of the 2nd file system installed in the RDB, so it's not available when you boot and therefore the partition isn't mounted. The Mounter tool or similar should still be able to see the partition in this case however and manually mount it, provided the filesystem is in L:

There isn't a problem using more than one file system on a hard drive, so the issue must be something else...

[liviux76]

Thanks jPV and Daedalus.

After some reading, yesterday I had confirmation that it is possible to have different filesystems on the same drive, so I was certainly making some mistakes.

At the end I decided to format both partitions with PFS3 since it is much faster that FFS, so the issue is "solved". I think that I was using wrong values in hdtoolbox when preparing the partitions and probably this was the reason for the "inconsistent" situation after a reboot.

[liviux76]

I understood what was my mistake.
When preparing the second partition, on the window called "File System on SCSI Address...", instead of "Add File System" I used to do "Update File System" and, this way, I always removed the previous file system (the one I used for the first partition), deleting the first partition.
I know, I am really silly sometimes!