Installation of Amiga OS 4 on SFS... blank screen when installed...

[crispy]

This is actually a long running problem since August last year really and I still haven't solved it, but the guys at irc.abime.net have suggested I ask here as there is more chance of an Amiga OS 4 user who might have had the same problem.

The original post thread is at:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=39072

But here is the latest post by myself, hopefully someone here can help:

Well guys, I finally went about getting SFS installed on this machine after getting my 040 PPC board upgraded to an 060 - I installed SFS as per Killer Gorilla's excellent instructions and it works brilliantly for OS3.9..

Installing SFS allowed the Installer to start (after I resized OS3.9's partition from 250mb to 160), and it appeared to allow OS 4 to be installed on the second partition.

It wouldn't start however with SFS on there, it would give me the usual blue, then red, then purple screens and do nothing... I then reformatted to FFS and it installed ok again and started, but OS 4 threw a load of errors about the SFS partitions on the machine.... plus with the additional side effect of the OS 4 FFS partition being 100% full and saying that it needed to be validated!!

I really don't know why I can't get this running again on this drive... 3.9 runs like a dream on the 060 with SFS now but surely OS 4 should work too!

I also set down and tried MorphOS again - not much luck here either... same old black screen...... arrrrgggh!! I guess I'm not good at the whole amiga thing anymore!

Anyone have any good suggestions for OS 4 and SFS?

Thanks
Chris

[mechy]

I didn't see a mention of the hardware you run on,but i'm using it on my A4000t and a4000 medaitor setups fine. the easiest thing to do is to boot with the os4 floppy,and use the hd tools there to partition the drive and add SFS,just run it and change the filesystem to sfs/00 for each partition.

also,make sure u dont have vga only checked in the os4 installation if you have a scan doubler/flicker fixer(picasso IV here in use).

hope that helps,
    mech
 

[crispy]

Hi Mechy,

The hardware I have is:

Amiga 1200 with
Blizzard 060 PPC 603+ 144mb RAM
BlizzardVision
4-way IDE adapter (unbuffered I think!)
20 GB hard drive
Prism2 wireless card.
DCE Scan Magic

I do have a Scan doubler, I think have selected 31Khz mode, but because I use the BVision, I don't think its a problem.

I have selected the partition as SFS/00 ..

Would it have something to do with SFS installed on the RDB for the other 68k partitions (i.e. OS 3.9)?

Cheers
Chris

[djbase]

FileSystem in RDB is global so its valid for all paritions on this hard drive. I also have SFS in RDB and used it for all partitions. No matter what system (3.x, 4.x, MOS) I use it works fine.

[crispy]

Could it have something to do with the size of the partitions then?

DH0: which has Workbench 3.9 on it, is the first partition - its allocated 160mb..  

AOS4: is the second partition for OS 4 and it is allocated 500mb...  and so on..

Cheers
Chris

[redfox]

@crispy

Sadly, I do not have any experience with OS4 Classic, so I can't give any specific advice.  I don't know how to setup OS4 Classic to use the graphics chips that may be available.

I know for sure that OS4.0 will install fine on a 1 GB partition, but I can't remember the minimum usable partition size.

Things get very tricky if multiple versions of AmigaOS exist on the same hard drive.  I do not know how to set up a dual boot system so I will not go there.

In my own case, I have a MicroA1.  I wanted to keep things as simple as possible.  At first I was using a small 1.3 GB hard drive with a single partition.  Later I upgraded to a 40 GB hard drive and used more than one partition.  One partition was my "system" partition, another was my "stuff" partition where I kept some stuff like pictures and videos.

I formatted my hard drive and did a clean install each time I installed a new version of OS4.  I did the same procedure when I installed OS4.1.  That was the easiest way for me to make sure that I was starting fresh each time.  Of course I did a backup before each upgrade, so that I could fall back if necessary.

---
redfox

[crispy]

@redfox

Thanks for the advice - You are definitely right there, you have to keep it as simple as possible.  I've been listening to too many folks about SFS and all sorts of stuff...

Anyways, I had posted this over at EAB also, and Calgor there suggested that I should be picking the FFS included with OS4...  I'd forgotten completely that OS4 came with a later version.

To cut a long story short, I reinstalled again, this time making sure I created the partition and formatted it with the new FFS in OS4.  Low and behold, the whole lot worked!!

There is a little side effect though - it seems OS4 has trouble reading my SFS partitions - comes up with Read errors all the time.  I think these are false positives though as when I boot into 3.9, the errors are gone.  It is very strange.

[Framiga]

what SFS version you have installed?

[crispy]

It is 1.277

Chris