Drive Updating

[Piru]

@Kgrach

Uhm, are you *absolutely* sure AmigaoS 3.9 in any way helps giving >4GB access with GVP SCSI? I'm not.

To my knowlege the deciding factor is the firmware rom of the controller. If the firmware driver (gvpscsi.device) is too old, no filesystem can fix the 4GB limit.

[Piru]

@Hyperspeed

So you've filled up 250Gb on a PFS disk and you accidentally delete a load of files and want to salvage them or unformat.

PFS3 max partition size is 100GB, so that'd mean 3 partitions on such a disk (100, 100, 50).

DiskSalv won't work on anything other than a classic Commodore file system!

That's alright since you don't need to use DiskSalv for PFS.

Aren't you leaving yourself open to one hell of a vulnerability if you don't have a recovery program/undeleter?

PFS3 comes with two salvage programs: DiskValid and pfsdoctor. Not that you ever really need them, unlike with FFS that nukes regularily.

PFS has .deldir feature, you have upto 992 deleted files available from there. Also, if you notice you did a mistake with large delete, you can just reboot quickly and the files will be back. PFS3 only writes changes to disk when the filesystem has been idle for about 2 seconds.

I have 320GB of PFS3 partitions, filled up with data. I am not worried.

[Piru]

@Hyperspeed

Surely fragmentation is a big problem on a 250Gb disk and how do you defrag that, let alone on a classic Amiga (with IDE interface).

With PFS3 you copy files around. Beatiful isn't it?

Maybe I should read up on it more, but anything not conforming to the RDB standard may well not conform to other standards. Particularly when burning a PFS3 partition to CD, putting one onto a solid state disk or SCSI stuff.

hm?
For CDs one uses ISO-9660 (with RockRidge or Joliet etc). Can't think of any application for using other filesystems on a CD.

PFS3 is fully RDB conform. You can use it like any other filesystem, solid state disk, SCSI etc. Even if there is no RDB support, you can still use mountlists to mount partitions manually.

Having said that though, Amiga owners are having to search on eBay for drives these days so the chances of stumbling on a disk full of bad blocks and worn out bearings is much higher.

True. Nothing helps if the disk dies, regardless of filesystem. There is no substitute for backups.

I know there are adaptors to allow you to use IDE drives on SCSI, and Ultra-Wide SCSI on SCSI-2 - it'd be nice to be able to walk into a PC shop and buy a brand-new hard disk (with warranty, instructions) instead of abandoned server disks floating about on auction sites.

I did just that with my A1200 BPPC SCSI. I had 100GB total IDE HDDs connected to the Blizzard PPC SCSI contoller. All PFS3, naturally.