Help! I'm trying out PFS3 ver 5.3

[Tenacious]

There is good news and bad.

The good news.
It seemed to install fine after assigning Workbench: to my Sys: partition and renaming pfs3-020ds to pfs3ds.  PFSdoctor was able to recover the partitions on one of the drives on which PFS2 had failed 2 years ago (I thought the hardware had failed).  The documentation is better.

The bad news.  
When I attempted to update the PFS2 partitions to PSF3, it wiped all of the data and partitions (I have backups).  This was a surprise, but not the problem I need to solve.

The bigger problem now is after re-partitioning the drive, the new partitions won't show up.  I can't format them because the system doesn't think they exist.

Auto Mount is checked on all of them.  I used the HDinstTools supplied with PFS3.  The filesystem is set to PFS\3 (in Commodore's HDtoolBox the identifier is 0x50465303).  I have 2 reserved blocks at the beginning, none at the end.  Mask is 0x7FFFFFFC.  MaxTrransfer is 0x00FFFE00.

This system is an unaccelerated A3000 with a Picasso 2.  I am booting with another HD that has FFS on it.  

Any ideas?  It's late, I must be missing something obvious.  

To the author, thanks for releasing this to the community.

[Tenacious]

Happy New Year!

Thanks to all who responded in my moment of need.  It's obvious that I don't spend a lot of time partitioning and formatting.  What do you guys do for a living, grin?

It was something obvious in hindsight.  The dropdown to select filesystem was set to Custom instead of PFS\3.  I got the partitions formatted about 3:30AM last night.  I have since copied everything over and it all "feels" solid now.  No need for several attempts at moving data, no strange lockups.

At Cosmos, I wish I understood the source of your numbers for Mask and Maxtransfer.  In fact, I wish I had better knowlege of the stock A3000 SCSI interface in general.  The PFS docs were good, but they didn't name the A3000 specifically.  Is it considered Zorro 2 or 3 or neither?  Is it 16 bit or 32 (I thought the 3000 has 32 bit buses throughout)?  I read in the PFS docs that the Mask value should end with a "C" value for long word alignment.  True?  

Maxtransfer is an equally vague topic for me.  I know what it is, but, values seem to be found by trial & error.  The PFS docs suggest " .. most SCSI devices (the A3000's interface?) can handle a Maxtransfer of 0xfffe00, which is 16 MB."   Are there specs published somewhere for most Amiga controllers that I haven't found?  Cosmos, I'm not trying challenge you, I'm simply trying to understand my systems better.

At Thomas & Framiga, a READMEFIRST! text file with a warning would have been helpful.  I did like the way I could "dial in" the size of my partitions with better precision than I have ever achieved with HDtoolBox.  I also liked that the filesystem was called by name rather than a hex string, even though I did stumble with this for a while.

Thomas, thanks for the utilities.

I have been excited all day about recovering my drive (more drives to follow).  Amigas are my favorite computers.  It's hard to communicate the loss 2 years ago when, a setup I believed to be "bullet proof", went belly up.  I had 2 HDs, both 4 Gig Quantums, each a mirror of the other, installed.  They both corrupted on different partitions but within a month of each other.  Is there something strange in PFS2?  Could it happen again in PFS3?   PFSdoctor, an addition to PFS3, seems to have saved my sanity for now.  2012 is looking up.

[Tenacious]

I do want to try out PFS3 though.  The lure of faster speed is hard to resist   but the possibility of losing data is scary.

I started with this filesystem back when it was called AmiFileSafe.  I couldn't believe how much faster my 7 MHz A500's HD was, especially when combined with a fast dirutil like Ordering.  AmiFileSafe is still on that system's 120 MB hard drive.

PFS2 allowed much larger drives and included a limited repair utility (Diskvalid?).  I twice went years without failures.

The actual filesystem of PFS3 seems advanced a few revision points beyond PFS2's (I don't know the improvements) and it includes the utility PFSdoctor, which I am, so far, very impressed with.

I can only speculate if completely filling a partition could cause a problem.  It seems this was the case when I experienced corruption.  Or maybe I caught a virus or did something in ignorance.  Who knows?

I am going to give another try, the speed increase is hard to give up.

[Tenacious]

Hi mechy

I vaguely remember something about "reversed term power diodes."  Do you have more info on this?

[Tenacious]

@ Paul
How do you feel about adding some fast ram?  It improved my 600 in multiple ways, .

[Tenacious]

There have been some discussions of modern sources for compatible PCMCIA ram cards.  I can't help with this, mine (4 Megs, which I think is the maximum size) dates from mid 90s, when they were advertized in printed magazines.

I've never wirelessly networked a 600 (I have browsed the WWW with one thru a serial modem).  On first glance, I would think you would want an Amiga with better graphics for networking.  I probably don't understand your goals here.

The ACA is a 32-bit accelerator and the 32 Megs of ram is tied to it.  I doubt your 16-bit 68000 (8 megs of fast, maximum) can access any part of it with the accelerator disabled.