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themaic has been helping me try and mount a dh2 partition selected as FAT32 with a dossdriver generated from mediatoolbox, we are really scraching our heads (my sam460) as to why it wont mount dh2 - cxdos will mount fat32 usb sticks, floppies, image files etc but not this uninitialized partiton, below is the dosdriver listing can anyone suggest something?


Device = sam460sata.device
Unit = 0
Filesystem =L:CrossDOSFilesystem
Flags = 0
Surfaces = 2
SectorsPerBlock = 8
BlocksPerTrack = 32
Reserved = 2
LowCyl = 1636907
HighCyl = 1670073
Buffers = 600
BufMemType = 1
MaxTransfer = 0x7fffffff
Mask = 0xfffffffe
DosType = 0x46415432
GlobVec = -1
#

Update:

well it's mounted uninitialized, but reports when i try to initialize it - (wb reports its size as 16mb, tho the partition is approx 1 gig )that the cluster geometry:

Disk_Warning!
Volume has broken Cluster geometry!
Can't mount it!

I don't recall if I ever made a FAT32 partition on my HDs.

You set it up on the HD, but did you format it. I mean the same way you need to format a amiga partition before you can mount/use it.

yes, ill attempt to format it, it will go to 99% format tells me it cant validate it, then i shut down all the requesters and it remounts it as unititialised

note i can format a ffs partition fine....

I'm actually thinking its a limitation/bug of crosdos/sam40sata.device, unless someone can tell me otherwise, I'm eager to find a resolution -Barana

I wouldn't call it a limitation. I'd call it misuse. A FAT partition on an Amiga harddrive is of no use. FAT does not support Amiga file attributes, so it cannot be used to properly store Amiga files. And PC operating systems cannot be made to find this partition because they cannot handle the Amiga partition table, so it cannot be used for data exchange, either. So why should CrossDOS support it?

In order to make a proper FAT partition to exchange data with PC operating systems, you have to partition a HDD on the PC operating system. Then you can make an Amiga DosDriver to access the FAT partition. With CrossDOS it should be as easy as giving it the right name in order to select the desired parttiion. Give it a three letter name and set the third letter to C for the first partition, D for the second and so on.

a. A fat32 partition _IS_ of use on an amiga hardhrive - as im attempting to setup PC-Task.
b.crossdos fat, as the documentation goes, does support separate files for the aos filebits which crossdos 'puts together' for workbench's benefit, invisible to traditional fat-using oses such as msdos,windows et al.

c.I tried renaming the dosdriver for the partition as u _seem_ to suggest, MHC0: but it doesnt make a difference whatsoever, the same symptoms appear - see post 2.
d. any more helpful suggestions?


there is nothing more in the dox, it seems that i should be doing to get this thing mounted I do believe crossdos allows me to mount an rdb fat partition.

ya gotta excuse me, this it my first serious amiga ive owned - a500 & a600 excused - where ive attempted to use it as a power machine. I come from GS/OS ,68k MACOS and shivers winworld, so im enjoyably learning , for now.

The filesystem employs a special algorithm to automatically chose
the FAT12, FAT16, or FAT32 format required to make best use of the
disk by maximizing cluster count. Formatting behavior can be
modified for special purposes as follows:
Its theses lines here i dont understand in the crossdos dox,
Do I need to use any of them in my dosdriver?

thx.





de_PreAlloc
Setting this mountlist FSSM environment value to a non-zero
value forces the minimum number of block per cluster on
formatting to this value.
de_SectorsPerBlock
This mountlist FSSM environment value can is really treated
as "FAT physical blocks" per "FAT sector" and be set to
a power of 2 to enforce a specific FAT sector size of 512,
1024, 2048, 4096 bytes, when multiplied with the physical
sector size of the underlying disk.
If set to zero, block size equals sector size as if it hda
been set to one.
de_Surfaces
Will be entered into the FAT specific information fields
when formatting a disk

Cant someone at hyperion who knows crossdos help please?

barana wrote:a. A fat32 partition _IS_ of use on an amiga hardhrive - as im attempting to setup PC-Task.

Why not just format the partition in PC-Task then? If you're going to use the partition inside an emulator then you shouldn't mount the partition in AmigaOS at all as then you will have two filesystems (one in AmigaOS, one in the emulator) using the same partition at the same time which can only mean trouble.