Amiga File Attributes Lost During .lzx & .lha Extraction on Windows?

[ChaosLord]

If the information above is correct, and the only way of preserving the file attributes while moving the files between different OS:es

Yes its a common problem.  I have had to deal with it innumerable times because ppl download my games from Aminet and then extract them to NTFS thus causing them to go bonkers and do berzerk things and break.

Ppl have a misconception that NTFS can do all that the Amiga can do.  This is not true.

But the solution is easy enuff:
1. Never extract Amiga archives to an NTFS partition.
2. Only extract Amiga archives to an Amiga partition.
3. It is dead easy to make an Amiga partition in WinUAE.  You create a .hdf file (hdf = HardDriveFile) of any size you like.  This .hdf file will function as a virtual Amiga hard drive.  Its very fast and preserves all the Amiga file attributes.

You have 3 main choices when creating a hardfile.  You can format it as:
1. PFS3
2. SFS
3. FFS
4. OFS

I personally recommend that you format your hardfiles with PFS3 (with the long filenames option) as it is the fastest and allows filenames of 107 chars.  The maximum parition size of a PFS3 partition is around 104GB.  So I would keep it down to 100GB or less.  A 100GB Amiga hard drive is big enuff for most ppl.

[ChaosLord]

Thanks for the prompt replies!

I'll test both approaches once I have received my AmigaOS CD. The .hdf approach might be a good way of preserving all the Amiga stuff -- extracting all the files inside a virtual Amiga hard drive could be the best thing to do to play it safe.

Absolutely.

Otherwise you end up with buggy games and apps.

1. In case I do all the file extraction inside a virtual Amiga HD, what file extractors ("unpackers") or file archivers do you recommend either for AmigaOS or for the command-line interface? I have read somewhere that AmigaOS 3.9 has UnArc and nicholas mentioned the lha self extractor.

The only one that works 100% correctly is the lha cli command available from Aminet.

The fancy GUI versions all have bugs and don't unarchive empty dirs correctly.

Other GUI unarchivers mess up the dates.

The CLI version works 100% correctly.

2. Do all the Amiga extractors/file archivers support the most common archive file formats like .rar, .zip, or .tar? And what about segmented or multi-volume archives? For example, "Data.part01.rar", "Data.part02.rar" and so on. Notice also that some multi-volume archives can take several gigabytes of data, and I'm not sure how well the Amiga can handle them.

I'm asking these questions as I wonder whether I could use the .hdf method all the way without extracting anything with Windows tools.

There are probably various GUI unarchivers that do all that you ask.  I am not really familiar with them because of the aforementioned bugs.

When using the original CLI versions:
lha does .lha files
zip (or unzip) does .zip files
etc.

Those are really the only 2 archive types I use on my Amigas.

I think that it might be safe to unzip, unrar, un7zip all those pc formats on the PC to an NTFS partition but I am not 100% sure.

The way I remember it certain characters on the Amiga don't look the same on a Windoze NTFS partition.


I can say for a fact you need to unlha .lha archives "on your Amiga with your Amiga" even if your "Amiga" is a virtual machine running on your W7 pc.  Because I have encountered the problems of not doing so, over and over and over again.

[ChaosLord]

Have you tested if these problems are present when Amiga archives are extracted to ext3, ext4 or ext5 partitions that are used for Linux distributions?

Sadly no

I had 2 pcs with linux installed and the HD of course used one of those filesystems.

But I never really got to use it.  As soon as my brother found my pcs with superfancy linux installed he freaked out, formatted the drive and installed WindowsXP.

That is how I came to find endless numbers of bugs related to Windows XP and NTFS and/or WinUAE.

A couple more important questions though: can any archive files *themselves* contain any Amiga-specific attributes without which the Amiga is not able to successfully extract the archives?

Nah.  I don't think so.

But if you get any "ERROR: File is read-protected" then I change my answer because the -R bit did not get set.
The Amiga bits are RWEDHSPA
I don't remember what H does and A shouldn't make any difference for your purposes.
R = file is Readable
W = file is Writable
E = file is Executable
D = file is Deletable
S = file is a Script (I guess Arexx uses this?)
P = file is Pure

If u get any error messsages about that then you know something went wonky.

Moreover, I noticed that nearly all of those .rar archives that I have on my NAS contain lots of different Amiga disk image files. ADF and DMS were the most common but there were ADZ, IPF, HDF, and HDZ as well. At least those archives that merely contain HDF and HDZ files (virtual Amiga HDs) can very well be extracted to an NTFS partition but I'm not entirely sure about the rest of the disk image formats. Of course, I have had gazillions of .adf files on my NTFS partition and at least WinUAE can open them without any problems.

If you have archives within archives then you can extract the outer layers of archiviness on your PC/NTFS and it should work with 99.99% probability.

Its just that final layer when you extract an archive that produces real Amiga files and dirs that you have to take care with.  Do that on your "Amiga" to an Amiga HD.