SFS AmigaOS 4 Classic and AmigaOS 3.x

[nyteschayde]

So I booted up my Amiga OS 4.0 Classic (no, I don't have 4.1 yet) using the boot floppy and then from CD. Once the OS came up I set up my partitions to have a 4GB SFS/00 partition followed by a 20GB SFS/02 partition and finally a SWAP partition of a few GB. Swap isnt enabled in OS 4.0 but I do plan on upgrading to 4.1 where I hear it is.

Next I installed the OS after rebooting a few times to make the partitions be seen. Everything was A-OK. Rebooted and played around with the newly installed OS 4.

The next morning, after a cold reset, my harddrives were nowhere to be found. I managed to make the Amiga boot back into OS 4 using the boot floppy and CD and then suddenly, voila, my drives were back.

Is there any way I can get the drives to appear normally under 3.x and still work in 4.x? Do I need to start over (again) and format SFS under 3.x and then use that partition under 4.x? What do I do?

Anybody have any ideas?

My hardware

A1200 in a Tower
Blizzard PPC 603e 233/68060
2MB Chip 192MB FAST
4xEIDE (piece of crap; longing for an IDEFix or other better device)
  > Primary Master 30GB ATA Drive
  > Primary Slave CD-Rom
  > Secondary Master 4GB CF IDE Adapter
  > Secondary Slave 40GB ATA Drive
Mediator 1200 SX
Radeon PCI
Spider USB Card
Catweasel MkIV PCI
Lyra Keyboard Adapter
Cocolino Mouse Adapter
Subway USB

[nyteschayde]

So I didn't see a lot of info on how to (or not to) put SFS in the RDB. Do you know where this is described? I see references to it everywhere, but no instructions on how to. I formatted the drive (quick format) under AmigaOS 4 using the Icon->Format Workbench menu.

If there is more to be done, I don't know what it would be. I've been at this all week. Not only this problem but several other drive related excursions wherein I've lost at least one full partition of FFS data (the reason for trying SFS) and various configuration upgrades. Adding a drive, moving them around, using the CF IDE drive as my first drive vs a normal hard drive. Later realizing that my original drive was wasting about 20GB of unused space due to the way it had been originally set up. Trying move data from one drive to another, etc....

So I don't really want to have to reformat and reinstall again if I don't have to, but will if necessary.

[nyteschayde]

Wow! I'll try that immediately. There's a little RTFM for me. Thanks for taking the time to help me out.

[nyteschayde]

So the good news is that it mostly works. The bad news is I at least have to load scsi.device 52.x into residency using a boot floppy. After that all things work correctly. I'd like to know much more about the file system loading capabilities. And how it works. What other things can be loaded that way? Anything else? Could be interesting if so.

Thanks again for your advice.