SFS Tutorial

[Everblue]

I was wondering if there is an in-depth step by step tutorial explaining in detail how to go about preparing an SFS hard drive

Any ideas? Thanks!

[Crumb]

I was wondering if there is an in-depth step by step tutorial explaining in detail how to go about preparing an SFS hard drive

Any ideas? Thanks!

0. perform a backup copy of your important data.

1. copy SFS to sys:L (IIRC filesystems should be located in a partition that can be read by the rom so store your filesystems in the first 4GB of the HD in a FFS partition that can be accessed from KS3.1)

2. open HDToolbox. In the filesystems section, add the SFS located in sys:L

3. SFS will appear in the list of filesystems installed together with his version number.

4. Choose an empty partition and in the part where you set the block size, mask transfer, filesystems... choose SFS.

5. Save all the changes and exit hdtoolbox in a system friendly way. It will ask if you want to reboot, tell him you'll love it!

6. Once your machine has rebooted an alien partition will appear. You'll need to format it. You can format it from WB just like you would do with a normal partition.

7. enjoy. There are tools to perform a backup of the RDB, go make one backup as it would make save your precious data in the future.

8. did I miss anything?

[Thomas]

3a. overtype the identifier by 0x53465300 (SFS) or 0x53465302 (SFS2, for partitions larger than 128GB). If you don't, the id will default to CFS (confused file system = stupid user sitting behind the keyboard).

[Everblue]

1. copy SFS to sys:L (IIRC filesystems should be located in a partition that can be read by the rom so store your filesystems in the first 4GB of the HD in a FFS partition that can be accessed from KS3.1)

2. open HDToolbox. In the filesystems section, add the SFS located in sys:L

3. SFS will appear in the list of filesystems installed together with his version number.

3a. overtype the identifier by 0x53465300 (SFS) or 0x53465302 (SFS2, for partitions larger than 128GB). If you don't, the id will default to CFS (confused file system = stupid user sitting behind the keyboard).

4. Choose an empty partition and in the part where you set the block size, mask transfer, filesystems... choose SFS.

5. Save all the changes and exit hdtoolbox in a system friendly way. It will ask if you want to reboot, tell him you'll love it!

6. Once your machine has rebooted an alien partition will appear. You'll need to format it. You can format it from WB just like you would do with a normal partition.

7. enjoy. There are tools to perform a backup of the RDB, go make one backup as it would make save your precious data in the future.

[Everblue]

Are you sure regarding 6? I thought you had to use a tool called SFSformat or something like that to format the HDD.

[countzero]

you don't have to use SFSFormat. But if you're going to format from WB, use QuickFormat. Full format will wreck your partition.

[Thomas]

Full format will probably not wreck this partition but a completely different one. That's why it is so dangerous.

SFSFormat is only needed if you want to set special SFS options already at format time. You can always change them later by the supplied tools.

You should always use quick format for all harddrive parttions and with all tools. Full format does not make any sense on a harddrive, it just stresses the drive. Only if you want to sell the HDD and need to safely scratch each and every piece of private data, then a full format of the entire HDD makes sense.

[Bamiga2002]

How about low-level formatting an IDE-drive, because it's bound to scsi.device and thus is a SCSI-drive ?

[Everblue]

Ok - I followed this tutorial and created an SFS partition - OS3.9 will be installed on it. How much space does OS3.9 need anyway?

Thanks!

[dangermouse]

I had the same question a few days ago and found this website which got me going:

http://wiki.abime.net/amiga:killergorilla_sfs_winuae_realhdd

Only question I had outstanding is how to do it if installing onto a blank hard drive i.e. you can't put the filesystem into sys:L as it doesn't exist. What I did was copy the filesystem onto a floppy and point HDToolBox to it to install the new filesystem. Seems to have worked fine but who knows..maybe I thought I'd got it right but got it completely wrong with realising it. Used SFSFormat to format the partition as per the tutorial so I assume it worked.

[Everblue]

Stupid question - which is the latest version of SFS? I got 1.58 from here:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~hjohn/SFS/download.htm

[dangermouse]

Well bugger me. I thought I'd found the homepage at http://strohmayer.org/sfs/ but that is now looking old if you have a newer version Odd that the latest I could find on Aminet matches the one in the link I've stated.

Something strange going on anyway. The version numbers on the site I listed don't correlate with the version numbers I found on your site..it's almost like they're two different softwares.

[Framiga]

http://strohmayer.org/sfs/

[Everblue]

Why do I have version 1.58? When the latest (even on aminet) is 1.227 or something like that?

[Framiga]

Well bugger me. I thought I'd found the homepage at http://strohmayer.org/sfs/ but that is now looking old if you have a newer version Odd that the latest I could find on Aminet matches the one in the link I've stated.

Something strange going on anyway. The version numbers on the site I listed don't correlate with the version numbers I found on your site..it's almost like they're two different softwares.

1 279 is newer than 1.58 ;-) and yes SFS have a new developer since years

Edit- remember that the 2 versions are NOT compatible (reformat is required)