SFS v1.227

[X-ray]

I'm struggling with SFS V1.227 (downloaded it from Aminet last night)

My system: A4kt, 3.1, 060, 216mb RAM, patches for >4gb in place, no gfx card.
Drive: Quantum Fireball 3.2gb SCSI, four partitions, the biggest is 1gb
First I formatted all the partitions as FFS, blank.
Okay, so I copied SmartFileSystem to L:, opened up HDToolBox, add SFS to the custom filesystems, select SFS/00 for each partition, check the dos identifier is correct, save changes, "all data will be lost bla bla bla" then reboot just as it asks.
Upon reboot, I have 4 nondos icons. Cool. I got to format, it formats okay until the end where it initialises the disk and that is where it hangs. Only the mouse pointer moves, nothing else works.
I reboot, try a quick format, the same thing happens.
I install SFSmui, add SFSformat as one of the commands, try to format the drive that way, it also hangs.
Even when trying to format it via CLI directly with SFSformat it fails. "Return to begin formatting or CTRL-C to abort"...I press return: no further shell output, no drive activity, system unuseable except for mouse. By the way the partition I am trying to format is blank, 311mb.

Any ideas?

Edit: I've tried V1.61 and v1.84 too (found the latter at http://www.xs4all.nl/~hjohn/ ) and they didn't improve my situation. In fact 1.84 crashes the system upon attempted initialisation: guru 8000 000B (I think that is a CPU exception: what is opcode 1111 ??)

[Framiga]

Hi X-ray

first of all, DON'T use SFS 1.227.

It has problems with Idefix and large disks.

Use SFS 1.214 or 1.230

http://home.wtal.de/js/SFS_1.230.lha

Bye

[X-ray]

@ Framiga

Thanks for your help, I appreciate it.
I get crashes with 1.230, 1.61 and 1.84. I'm looking for v1.124, haven't found it yet.

[Framiga]

contact me privately

Ciao

have you increased the dosbuffers at least to 200?

It is strange that you got crashes even with the older version

[X-ray]

Okay people I have found the source of the problem:

I had the drive on my CybSCSI controller and it wouldn't format SFS but could format anything else. I took it off, put it on the onboard SCSI, and it works fine with 1.230 and with 1.84. (those are the ones I tested, I suspect it will work with all versions of SFS)
I never liked the CybSCSI much, and even though it has the latest ROM flashed, I found the performance to be nothing special. I'll use it just for my CD-writer and Zip drive now.
I don't know why the CybSCSI doesn't like it: I played around with Unitcontrol and SCSIconfig, but that didn't solve the problem so it's a mystery to me.

[X-ray]

I thought of something else:

Are there any benefits to me installing SFS on my Compact Flash Disk (it is my boot disk, not much writing, more reading) ??
Has anyone done this?

[lordv]

For boot partitions it is preferrable to install FFS, because for FFS only there are comprehensive checking and repairing tools like QBT and others... If you never (or rarely) write your boot disk, it doesn't matter whether it's ffs or pfs or sfs except for repairing cases and speed (ffs quite a slow) and size >2Gb (well... flash disk 2Gb?