Shapeshifter and hdd partisions.

[Damion]

I have had a few Shapeshifter tragedies in the
past, namely the Mac crashing and wiping out
some data on the Amiga side. Usually it would
onle take out (corrupt) the Shapeshifter
directory, fortunately.

I have destroyed my Mac partitions before
because I accidentally moved a bunch
of data over the "limit" without IDEFIX
active...now I am a bit more careful and better
know what I am doing. Sadly Shapeshifter only
works with FFS, so there's not much to stop
something horrible from happening if you
don't have your configurations right.

Just make sure that whatever solution you use
to recognize drive space above the "limit" with
FFS is active everytime you run it. If all of
your patches/etc are 'in ordnung' you will be
fine. ;-)

-edit-
If you use SFS/PFS3 you can be sure that at least
your Amiga partitions won't be written over
(the worst possible is a corrupted SS dir) so
IF any damage happens at all, is more likely
to occur on the FFS formatted Mac partitions,
and only if you disable IDEFIX/NSD/etc.
 

[Damion]

Hmm? Am I missing something?
Are we talking about making a dedicated Mac-only (HFS) HD partition, or making an Amiga partition that is used as the root file system directory for Shapeshifter?

Looking back my post didn't make much sense;
I'm talking about Mac (HFS) partitions placed on
an A1200 IDE drive above the 4gb FFS "limit",
there would be no worries with a small drive.

The HFS partitions have to use FFS on the Amiga
side, so NSD/TD64/IDEFIX/etc have to be right
if placing Mac partitions above the gb "limit",
whereas PFS/SFS would writeprotect the volume
and give an error requestor before any data
is written over (tried PFS, but the volume
won't format properly on the Mac end). Mine
weren't mounted either, but they still need
FFS on the Amiga end. The SS program dir
itself can of course work with any Amiga
compatabile FS.

Like an idiot I disabled IDEFIX and then copied
a bunch of files around above the limit...so
the Mac partitions (using FFS on the amiga side,
also above 4gb) were unfortunately damaged.

Now as a separate issue, I've had the Mac crash
badly and corrupt the Shapeshifter program
directory on the Amiga side...strange but true!
:-)


@lempkee

Make sure "Mac-Handler" is in "L:", and "MAC"
in Storage/Dosdrivers.

Fire up the emulator, and after it fully boots...

Click on the "MAC" icon in Storage/Dosdrivers
(or wherever you put it)

Now the icon for your Mac start volume should
pop up on the WB.

[Damion]

Actually, thinking about this, I bet I know what happened here. If the Mac crashes badly on shutdown, an errored PROM file can be written. I've actually seen this file end up cross-linked with another file in the Shapeshifter directory. If not quickly fixed, the directory could become corrupt. If the partition the ShapeShifter directory lives in is PFS, though, this shouldn't happen? Hmm...

Come to think of it, the Mac was in the process
of shutting down when it crashed and ruined
the files, so my bet is you're right, even
with PFS. PFS will stop something from writing
outside of defined patition boundries, but a
"normal" PROM write suddenly gone astray
makes sense.