Format external USB drive under OS 4.1u5

[amigasociety]

Connected a 500GB external USB drive to the rear port of my X1000. The drive is formated for Mac right now OS X. Trying to format for use on Amiga OS so I can backup to it.

Tried the format app in the System drawer and it sees the drive as USB0 but when I select it and ask to format, I get a message Format Failure, no disk in drive.

So, how to I format this drive? Should I partition it down since it is a large drive?

Any tips on partitioning amd formatting the drive would be great. Partition Wizard does not launch when double clicked.

tj

[tonyw]

PartitionWizard is of no help to you in this case - it is a repair facility for FFS and SFS.

It's been so long since I reformatted a foreign FS on a removable device that I've forgotten how to do it. But it goes something like this:

1) Plug the device into the computer. You should see an icon on the WB. This icon may be "NDOS" but it doesn't matter.
2) Open Media Toolbox and select "usbdisk.device". You should see your device there.
3) Select "Edit RDB/Install" and click "Install/read configuration". Exit back to the main window after clicking "Accept".
4) Select "Edit partitions and filesystems", make your desired number and sizes of partitions, choose what type of filesystem each is to be. (This is another story altogether, it may be simpler to start with the default until you are more familiar with the process).
5) Save, exit.

You will have to reboot to see the new device. A warm reboot is enough. Then you should see your device "Uninitialized".

6) Right-click on the WB icon, select "Format disk" and click "Quick Format". Once that has completed (a couple of seconds), you are right to go.


That should be it.

[amigasociety]

Cool, that worked for partitioning. I just made one big 465GB partition.

Is that an issue? Just using it to backup for now.

I then saw the drive mount, highlighted it, then selected Quick Format, and now the drive is seen in desktop.

Will test it now.

tj

[davebraco]

In addition to tonyw comment, I would suggest you to take a look at the File_System_Table pdf document located at the root of the AmigaOS 4.1 Update 5 CD for an overview of the available amiga file systems.

In your case, SFS2 should be fine. Don't forget to set block size to 512.

[amigasociety]

Once I get that CD, I plan to.

tj

[tonyw]

One big partition is fine if that's the way you want to store stuff.

Personally, I like to have lots of small partitions. I use them the way others use directories

[Slayer]

I use SFS2 to boot from and JXFS (This FS was created by the same author as SFS/SFS2) for everything else (I have several 1TB external USB2 drives which are single partitions and most are about 80% full and never ever had a problem)

I also use the NORECYCLED option of the SFSFormat command because I like to live dangerously

You can read about the SFS package here http://strohmayer.org/ but please be careful!

All you have to remember is DirOPUS asks "Are you sure?" when you select delete for a GOOD reason

Tip of relevance:
Buy Seagate Brand External HDs, open them up, slide the SATA HD out (Seagate currently has my vote on an easily removable SATA HD) and attach to your X1000 MB, enjoy the superior speed transfers as you fill it up, remove and reinsert it into the housing when full, and use it as you'd expect. Plug and Play