Help! I'm trying out PFS3 ver 5.3

[Tenacious]

There is good news and bad.

The good news.
It seemed to install fine after assigning Workbench: to my Sys: partition and renaming pfs3-020ds to pfs3ds.  PFSdoctor was able to recover the partitions on one of the drives on which PFS2 had failed 2 years ago (I thought the hardware had failed).  The documentation is better.

The bad news.  
When I attempted to update the PFS2 partitions to PSF3, it wiped all of the data and partitions (I have backups).  This was a surprise, but not the problem I need to solve.

The bigger problem now is after re-partitioning the drive, the new partitions won't show up.  I can't format them because the system doesn't think they exist.

Auto Mount is checked on all of them.  I used the HDinstTools supplied with PFS3.  The filesystem is set to PFS\3 (in Commodore's HDtoolBox the identifier is 0x50465303).  I have 2 reserved blocks at the beginning, none at the end.  Mask is 0x7FFFFFFC.  MaxTrransfer is 0x00FFFE00.

This system is an unaccelerated A3000 with a Picasso 2.  I am booting with another HD that has FFS on it.  

Any ideas?  It's late, I must be missing something obvious.  

To the author, thanks for releasing this to the community.

[Cosmos Amiga]

Mask : 0x7FFFFFFE
MaxTransfer : 0x0001FE00
Pfs3ds : 0x50445303

[Thomas]

When I attempted to update the PFS2 partitions to PSF3, it wiped all of the data and partitions (I have backups).

NEVER use HDInstTools on a disk which was partitioned by another program. While otherwise it is a great product, it has this one serious error which deletes all partitions created by other programs.

If you used HDToolbox before, keep using it. There is no need to switch to another program.

BTW, it did not wipe the data, it only deleted the partitions. If you recreate the partitions exactly as they were before, the data will reappear.

This should help you to recreate the partitions: http://aminet.net/package/disk/salv/RDBrecov
New version: http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online.de/downloads/rdbrecov.lha

[Framiga]

this is a very common mistake. It would have been safer to remove HDinstTools from the PFS3 archive OR to add a READMEFIRST! text file with a warning.

btw ... have a nice and prolific 2012 to All! :-)

[SimonV]

The PFS3 hdinsttools never worked for me, I always use the one on the OS3.9 emergency disc or even the one on the WB3.1 install disk

[Tenacious]

Happy New Year!

Thanks to all who responded in my moment of need.  It's obvious that I don't spend a lot of time partitioning and formatting.  What do you guys do for a living, grin?

It was something obvious in hindsight.  The dropdown to select filesystem was set to Custom instead of PFS\3.  I got the partitions formatted about 3:30AM last night.  I have since copied everything over and it all "feels" solid now.  No need for several attempts at moving data, no strange lockups.

At Cosmos, I wish I understood the source of your numbers for Mask and Maxtransfer.  In fact, I wish I had better knowlege of the stock A3000 SCSI interface in general.  The PFS docs were good, but they didn't name the A3000 specifically.  Is it considered Zorro 2 or 3 or neither?  Is it 16 bit or 32 (I thought the 3000 has 32 bit buses throughout)?  I read in the PFS docs that the Mask value should end with a "C" value for long word alignment.  True?  

Maxtransfer is an equally vague topic for me.  I know what it is, but, values seem to be found by trial & error.  The PFS docs suggest " .. most SCSI devices (the A3000's interface?) can handle a Maxtransfer of 0xfffe00, which is 16 MB."   Are there specs published somewhere for most Amiga controllers that I haven't found?  Cosmos, I'm not trying challenge you, I'm simply trying to understand my systems better.

At Thomas & Framiga, a READMEFIRST! text file with a warning would have been helpful.  I did like the way I could "dial in" the size of my partitions with better precision than I have ever achieved with HDtoolBox.  I also liked that the filesystem was called by name rather than a hex string, even though I did stumble with this for a while.

Thomas, thanks for the utilities.

I have been excited all day about recovering my drive (more drives to follow).  Amigas are my favorite computers.  It's hard to communicate the loss 2 years ago when, a setup I believed to be "bullet proof", went belly up.  I had 2 HDs, both 4 Gig Quantums, each a mirror of the other, installed.  They both corrupted on different partitions but within a month of each other.  Is there something strange in PFS2?  Could it happen again in PFS3?   PFSdoctor, an addition to PFS3, seems to have saved my sanity for now.  2012 is looking up.

[ChaosLord]

@Tenacious

I believe that your own initial Mask and MaxTransfer settings were correct.

IMHO I believe that Cosmos gave you settings for the crap A1200/A4000 hunk of junk IDE interface.

I have used many HD interfaces on my Amigas over the centuries and the A3000 SCSI was by far the best one ever.

I would stick with your original mask and maxtransfer unless someone with an A3000 who has specific technical information on this subject can give a reason as to why your values were wrong.

Yes the A3000 does have a 32bit bus.  Yes the A3000 ECS chipram is organized into 32-bit chunks just like an AGA machine.  Of course the Fastram is 32-bit also.

[ChaosLord]

 It's hard to communicate the loss 2 years ago when, a setup I believed to be "bullet proof", went belly up.  I had 2 HDs, both 4 Gig Quantums, each a mirror of the other, installed.  They both corrupted on different partitions but within a month of each other.  Is there something strange in PFS2?  Could it happen again in PFS3?

I communicate with many many Amiga users.

A great number have complained about data going missing when using SFS.

Several people have complained of data going missing on PFS3.

Because of all these complaints I have just stuck with good old reliable FFS all these years.

I do want to try out PFS3 though.  The lure of faster speed is hard to resist   but the possibility of losing data is scary. :nervous:

I love the guy who coded PFS3.  He is very very cool.  I love Piru for helping to continue its development a bit.

But it just seems to me, looking at it from the perspective of a business manager, that there is a certain level of risk involved in switching to PFS3.

If PFS3 is in fact 100% reliable then it means that all the people who complained about PFS3 were either:
A: Idiots
B: Had defective hard drives.
C: Had defective HD controllers
D: Had defective ram in their ancient Amigas
E: Had unreliable electrical power coming through the wall socket.
F: Had defective Power Supplies.
G: Running some evil hack or buggy program that corrupted the filesystem.
H: Other?

I realize that A-H are completely possible and that PFS3 might be 80000% reliable.  But I don't know for a fact.

I hope this analysis helps you in some way

[Tenacious]

I do want to try out PFS3 though.  The lure of faster speed is hard to resist   but the possibility of losing data is scary.

I started with this filesystem back when it was called AmiFileSafe.  I couldn't believe how much faster my 7 MHz A500's HD was, especially when combined with a fast dirutil like Ordering.  AmiFileSafe is still on that system's 120 MB hard drive.

PFS2 allowed much larger drives and included a limited repair utility (Diskvalid?).  I twice went years without failures.

The actual filesystem of PFS3 seems advanced a few revision points beyond PFS2's (I don't know the improvements) and it includes the utility PFSdoctor, which I am, so far, very impressed with.

I can only speculate if completely filling a partition could cause a problem.  It seems this was the case when I experienced corruption.  Or maybe I caught a virus or did something in ignorance.  Who knows?

I am going to give another try, the speed increase is hard to give up.

[mechy]

I communicate with many many Amiga users.

A great number have complained about data going missing when using SFS.

Several people have complained of data going missing on PFS3.

Because of all these complaints I have just stuck with good old reliable FFS all these years.

I do want to try out PFS3 though.  The lure of faster speed is hard to resist   but the possibility of losing data is scary. :nervous:

I love the guy who coded PFS3.  He is very very cool.  I love Piru for helping to continue its development a bit.

But it just seems to me, looking at it from the perspective of a business manager, that there is a certain level of risk involved in switching to PFS3.

If PFS3 is in fact 100% reliable then it means that all the people who complained about PFS3 were either:
A: Idiots
B: Had defective hard drives.
C: Had defective HD controllers
D: Had defective ram in their ancient Amigas
E: Had unreliable electrical power coming through the wall socket.
F: Had defective Power Supplies.
G: Running some evil hack or buggy program that corrupted the filesystem.
H: Other?

I realize that A-H are completely possible and that PFS3 might be 80000% reliable.  But I don't know for a fact.

I hope this analysis helps you in some way

In the years since 87' i have owned most amiga's and most scsi controllers etc out there,i have used SFS and never had one single failure with it.The A4000t i run daily has been going 24/7 for 10+ years now,and other than a mechanical HD failure about 5 years ago doesn't miss a beat with SFS - it was then i went to 32GB cf's for hard drives and never looked back.. I can't imagine anyone liking or wanted FFS these days. the other filesystems have so much more to offer. All my other 30 amiga's all run SFS also,but i can safely say i've tested it well.

I think 95% of the people i have met who have had trouble with SFS have not installed it or set it up correctly, most all of them never bothered to read the docs. The rest who had trouble were mostly max transfer settings.
the last bit was improper termination, bad scsi cables, or a flakey machine caused by bad ram. A few A3000's with reversed term power diodes..

PFS3 probabaly has the same people doing the same stuff

mech

[Tenacious]

Hi mechy

I vaguely remember something about "reversed term power diodes."  Do you have more info on this?

[touringsedan]

I am also running an A3000 SCSI CF and SFS and can say that Mask issues were an issue for me and I couldn't get it right.

Until, I read the docs from the SFS website, since then it has been fine.

I think there is mass confusion about Mask and Max transfer settings and there are many variables that affect what your safe setting is.

Either way, I had issues initially and once reading the docs/faqs it has worked amazingly well.

[paul1981]

Is anyone running PFS on a stock A600 with 2MB Chip mem with real hard drive?  I tried it last month and I found it to be slower than FFS when browsing Workbench (icons appear slower than with FFS).  I mean, icons appear slowly anyway on a 68000 (8 colour magic workbench) but Commodore FFS definitely had the edge in that department. But ASL reguester/directory lists were definitely faster under PFS.
If I was to add some fast memory or upgrade to 020/030 then I'm sure it would probably perform much better than the results I'm getting.
PFS ate more ram as well, which is a downside on a 2MB chip only machine.
I also had problems when copying large directorys (ie dragging DH0 into DH1 root) - I had PFS requesters sometimes appear saying "Out of memory error (RAM)" or something (allocated too much memory for the operation), which has never happened to me before under FFS.  Maybe PFS is a bit dicey on a chip only machine, I don't know but I think I'll stick with FFS.
I'm running Workbench 2.05 & Kickstart 37.350.
According to docs, SFS needs OS3, so it's PFS or FFS for my machine.  Would be nice to use SFS because I know it works well as I've used it for many years on my 1200 without any problems at all.

[Gulliver]

Is anyone running PFS on a stock A600 with 2MB Chip mem with real hard drive?  I tried it last month and I found it to be slower than FFS when browsing Workbench (icons appear slower than with FFS).  I mean, icons appear slowly anyway on a 68000 (8 colour magic workbench) but Commodore FFS definitely had the edge in that department. But ASL reguester/directory lists were definitely faster under PFS.
If I was to add some fast memory or upgrade to 020/030 then I'm sure it would probably perform much better than the results I'm getting.
PFS ate more ram as well, which is a downside on a 2MB chip only machine.
I also had problems when copying large directorys (ie dragging DH0 into DH1 root) - I had PFS requesters sometimes appear saying "Out of memory error (RAM)" or something (allocated too much memory for the operation), which has never happened to me before under FFS.  Maybe PFS is a bit dicey on a chip only machine, I don't know but I think I'll stick with FFS.
I'm running Workbench 2.05 & Kickstart 37.350.
According to docs, SFS needs OS3, so it's PFS or FFS for my machine.  Would be nice to use SFS because I know it works well as I've used it for many years on my 1200 without any problems at all.

You should definately try this version of PFS3
http://aminet.net/disk/misc/pfs3ks13.lha

[Tenacious]

@ Paul
How do you feel about adding some fast ram?  It improved my 600 in multiple ways, .