Question about the Amiga Fast File System

[StevenJGore]

Hi,

If I format a hard disk or floppy disk with Workbench 3.1, and I tick "Fast File System" in the format dialogue to get a slightly higher capacity, what is the earliest version of Workbench and/or Kickstart that can read these disks?

Please excuse the newbie-type question, but my minds gone blank, and I should know this!

Thanks!
Steve.

[xeron]

StevenJGore wrote:
I tick "Fast File System" in the format dialogue to get a slightly higher capacity, what is the earliest version of Workbench and/or Kickstart that can read these disks?

2.x can boot from and read Fast File System disks easily. There is a fastfilesystem driver that works on 1.3, but AFAIK you can't boot from FFS disks with it.

[StevenJGore]

2.x can boot from and read Fast File System disks

So presumably a hard drive formatted with FFS in an A1200 would be read-only in an A600?

[bloodline]

StevenJGore wrote:

2.x can boot from and read Fast File System disks

So presumably a hard drive formatted with FFS in an A1200 would be read-only in an A600?

no, why?

It should work fine.

[NightShade737]

Better advice would be to drop FFS and just use SFS. It's faster and you will never get those dreaded validation or read errors again...

[StevenJGore]

NightShade737 wrote:
Better advice would be to drop FFS and just use SFS. It's faster and you will never get those dreaded validation or read errors again...

I know, I use SFS on my A1200's hard drive and I've never looked back :-)
I'm just asking a few questions about the earliest version of Workbench and/or Kickstart that can read FFS, that's all.

no, why?

It should work fine.

I was just trying to clarify the first reply. So FFS is fully 2.04 compatible then?

[xeron]

StevenJGore wrote:
I was just trying to clarify the first reply. So FFS is fully 2.04 compatible then?

Yes.

[Thomas]

StevenJGore wrote:
Hi,

If I format a hard disk or floppy disk with Workbench 3.1, and I tick "Fast File System" in the format dialogue to get a slightly higher capacity, what is the earliest version of Workbench and/or Kickstart that can read these disks?

Please excuse the newbie-type question, but my minds gone blank, and I should know this!

Thanks!
Steve.

The file system program is stored on the HDD (at least it should be), so if you use an earlier OS version which does not include FFS, it is loaded from HDD. I never tried it but I assume even FFS Int Dircache should work on Kick 1.3 this way.

Bye,
Thomas

[Jope]

Just to recap:

Hard disk: you install FFS into the MBR and it then works with just about any OS as long as the controller understands RDB. It may be that if you use the FFS from 3.1, it'll crash under 1.3, so if you have a disk you intend to use with both OSes, try it first and if it doesn't work, then install the 1.3 FFS onto the RDB.. (you lose international mode and don't even think of using over 4GB disks/2GB partitions with the 1.3 FFS)

Floppy disk: OSes from 2.0 forwards know FFS floppies without any tricks, but with 1.3 you need to create and mount a separate device to be able to read FFS (and also no booting from FFS floppies).

It's rather simple - take a look at your devs:mountlist when you've booted to wb1.3, there's a device called DF1: and a device called FAST: .. make a new device called FF0:, and combine the DF1: stuff (change unit to 0!), and get dostype and filesystem from FAST:  .. then do a mount ff0: in a cli and you can use ffs disks in drive df0: (they show up inside the device ff0:)

Don't be alarmed by the above instructions, you'll understand it the minute you look at the mountlist..

Perhaps you need to issue a diskchange ff0: after you swap disks, I'm not sure as I haven't played around with 1.3 for ages.. And I'm too lazy to try it now. I'll leave some joy of discovery to you.

[xeron]

Jope wrote:
Hard disk: you install FFS into the MBR

Amigas don't use master boot records...

 and it then works with just about any OS as long as the controller understands RDB.

...they use Rigid Disk Blocks. They do a similar job, but they're not the same thing.

[Jope]

xeron wrote:

Jope wrote:
Hard disk: you install FFS into the MBR

Amigas don't use master boot records...

Haha that's what you get for talking PC and Amiga at the same time in different places.. :-)

Thanks for pointing that out, I seriously didn't notice.

[StevenJGore]

Cheers for all your replies guys!

I also accidentally found something about this over on the English Amiga Board, which I'll put here for anybody who's interested, and for anybody doing forum searches in future :-)

1.3 could autoboot from harddisk but you had to use the standard file system.

The problem came into being was when you had your HDD formatted to FastFileSystem which on 1.3 resided in the L: directory, and how do you autoboot from a drive who's driver resides on the disk you want to autoboot from.

Hence the emergence of 37.175 (2.04), Commodore moved fastfilesystem into the kickstart code, and voila... autobooting drives that had formatted to Fast File System.

[Jope]

The quote is partially incorrect.

If the HD controller fully supports the RDB standard, it loads the FastFileSystem from the RDB and is ready to go, happily booting from FFS partitions under 1.3.

However, if the controller doesn't do RDB (and there are many examples of this), there's only the OFS in the ROM and thus it can't understand the FFS boot partition.

For example the A2090 doesn't have RDB support, it uses a totally different scheme and there the boot partition must be OFS under Kickstart 1.x.

There are also some cards that support putting FFS into the RDB, but nothing else.. An old Supra WordSync comes to mind.. I could install PFS3 into the RDB, but the devices never came visible. With FFS everything worked like a charm.

Someone please tell me why there is so much partial / misleading information floating around about Amigas?

[StevenJGore]

Someone please tell me why there is so much partial / misleading information floating around about Amigas?

I don't think it's misleading, but it's definitely partial!

With regards to my above quote, and to be fair, the post from which it was taken was in the context of differences between A600 kickstart ROM's, RDB wasn't part of it. My apologies for quoting out of context! :-)