Formatting a 8GB CF the right way?

[kd7ota]

Hello Amigans,

Figured I wanted to give a try at properly formatting a Compact Flash card.  The current 4GB in my Amiga 1200 is formatted with Fast File Systems and all the partitions were kept around 500MB.  I am not sure if there will be future problems with this or what are the risks, so if anyone can clarify them please let me know.

I connected this 2nd 8GB CF card to my PC and attached it to WinUAE. I formatted it with each partitions being about 1.4GB in size. Everything went but after installing OS 3.9 on DH0, the rest of the drive became corrupted and you could no longer open partitions that said they were there.

Now, my question is, how do I go about properly setting up a 8GB CF card so I wont have to worry about risks of losing data.  What should I install prior to setting up the CF Card?

Thanks for reading. Any input is greatly appreciated.

[Thomas]

You have to install OS 3.9 first and then partition the new HDD. Ok, I see it's a hen and egg problem. So, before you install OS 3.9, make an emergency disk for OS 3.9. Then boot from the emergency disk and only then partition the drive. This way you should be rather sure that the new FFS from OS 3.9 ist used (check version for >= 45).

[nicholas]

You might want to use PFS3 instead.

Copy this to L: on your Emergency Floppy http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/pfs3aio and install it to the RDB on your CF.

You can get the full installation docs in this older archive.

http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/PFS3_53

[kd7ota]

Thanks for the input. Gives me the right direction to what I should do first.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Exactly what Thomas said.  Once you've made your emergency floppy put that in the disk drive and your OS 3.9 CD in the CD drive and boot.  It'll boot into Workbench and you'll be able to format your hard drive and install the OS.  I actually just did this on one of my systems a couple weeks ago and was very surprised how straight-forward it was (for an Amiga, that is).    Even though I know 3.9 can support larger partitions I still try to keep mine around 2GB each, and test them thoroughly before putting any irreplaceable data on them.  You should be fine though.  

I'm sure PFS or SFS is a good idea, maybe one of these days I'll get around to trying them out too, LOL.  

[nicholas]

Exactly what Thomas said.  Once you've made your emergency floppy put that in the disk drive and your OS 3.9 CD in the CD drive and boot.  It'll boot into Workbench and you'll be able to format your hard drive and install the OS.  I actually just did this on one of my systems a couple weeks ago and was very surprised how straight-forward it was (for an Amiga, that is).    Even though I know 3.9 can support larger partitions I still try to keep mine around 2GB each, and test them thoroughly before putting any irreplaceable data on them.  You should be fine though.  

I'm sure PFS or SFS is a good idea, maybe one of these days I'll get around to trying them out too, LOL.  

PFS3 is brilliant, it's fast, doesn't eat much memory, is rock solid stable, supports 107 character filenames and huge partitions (~100GB IIRC).

I use it on all my 3.9 and MorphOS machines, but I still keep a small 3.1 bootable FFS partition "just in case" on my 68k machines.