Hello.

I'm on a role with my bug complaining tonight. Err I mean warning. Okay I recently got a 4GB Verbatim USB drive. I had a few TV shows on it and some other stuff but nothing important. However tonight I was trying to play an MP3 off it but MultiView doesn't support them so I went to change the icon. I saved it out with TuneNet as default tool but it didn't change the icon. I tried to save again but this time the file went missing. I had a look in the root directory and all the files were gone!

I took it out, put the USB drive in my Mac and ran Disk Utility repair on it. It repared a lot but all my files were completely gone! Total disaster. It was also reported as a FAT2 drive. So, I am wondering, does CrossDOS support FAT32 and is it unusable on 32-bit size drives? Possibly bordering on 64-bit size.

It looks like USB drives >2GB will be useless on OS4. Such a pitty. Another system module out of date.

Last edited by Hypex on 02-Nov-2008 at 06:06 AM.

@Hypex

I'm on a role with my bug complaining tonight...
There are no such things as bugs or features. They're anomalies... Whatever the programmer want's to 'throwup' on you; something even you know by now! I blew up a 1GB drive. Drag & drop usually blows up the FAT table. Never edit anything on the drive.
so I went to change the icon
Bad idea! That's exactly what blew-up the drive. CrossDos and FAT32 don't see eye-to-eye. My San Disk works fine if I move data on or off the drive.

Edit: Got my FireFly lit up again! Power to the port i guess; a new 5V power convertor solved that. This 1GB holds a copy OS4.0 Final. The biggest failure was trying to copy SDK. It died somewhere in the middle of PERL. It think it was too many sub directories.

Last edited by Snuffy on 22-Jul-2008 at 03:39 PM.

_________________

@Hypex
Quote:

I'm on a role with my bug complaining tonight. Err I mean warning. Okay I recently got a 4GB Verbatim USB drive. I had a few TV shows on it and some other stuff but nothing important. However tonight I was trying to play an MP3 off it but MultiView doesn't support them so I went to change the icon. I saved it out with TuneNet as default tool but it didn't change the icon. I tried to save again but this time the file went missing. I had a look in the root directory and all the files were gone!

Thats nothing new for me, CrossDOS works fine for reading, but it will kill your files if you try to write something. I have tested it with a 512MB Stick, a 2GB MicroSD card, and two HDD (300GB and 500GB).

Quote:

I took it out, put the USB drive in my Mac and ran Disk Utility repait on it. It repared a lot but all my files were completely gone! Total disaster. It was also reported as a FAT2 drive. So, I am wondering, does CrossDOS support FAT32 and is it unusable on 32-bit size drives? Possibly bordering on 64-bit size.

It is reported as FAT2 because your software prints the 0x32 as ASCII-character.

CrossDOS does support FAT32 but its simply broken.

@Hypex

Possibly the use of Fat95 could help? I am using it in R/W mode on a 1GB CompactFlash card connected via CF-2-SCSI adaptor.

@stefanor

I think Fat95 is a TD64 type of file system, where dangers to the wrong type IO command.
Only file systems that use NSD64 is safe to use on AmigaOS4.
There exists a TD64patch for OS4, but need to know its running.
I never did have any success whit TD64 my self.

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@Snuffy

Quote:

There are no such things as bugs or features. They're anomalies... Whatever the programmer want's to 'throwup' on you; something even you know by now!

Quote:

I blew up a 1GB drive. Drag & drop usually blows up the FAT table. Never edit anything on the drive.

I've dragged and dropped before. Mostly OS4 would crash instead of wrecking a drive. It doesn't have FFS, so what's the problem? So, this editing, it can't handle pats of a file or even a whole one being replaced?

Quote:

Bad idea! That's exactly what blew-up the drive. CrossDos and FAT32 don't see eye-to-eye. My San Disk works fine if I move data on or off the drive.

Well I took it as any other write operation. Okay .info icons aren't guaranteed to work on a PC filesystem. But I didn't think it would destroy the whole drive along with all the data on it! Nothings was left. It was worse than an FFS invalidation!

@Hypex
Confused I am.
I use thumb drives as my main source of transfering files.
I drag and drop to my thumb drives all day long and have never ever blew up a thumb drive. Actually that is not true XP once did one in and one stopped working after a hot tub incident.


I am also hearing talk of fat this and that and crossdos.

Uhh you by chance didn't have a 3.9 poseidon lapse and install things thinking they were needed to get thumb drives working in OS4.0

with the current 4.0 You DON"T NEED TO DO ANYTHING TO GET THUMB DRIVES TO WORK.

If you stuck fat95 into your machine or did a crossdos configure that might have alot to do with your problem.

Kgrach

Last edited by kgrach on 19-Jul-2008 at 09:35 PM.
Last edited by kgrach on 19-Jul-2008 at 09:13 PM.
Last edited by kgrach on 19-Jul-2008 at 08:37 PM.

@all

I just tested a 2 gig thumb drive on OS4 final Clean.I drag and dropped multiple directories hundreds of files and changed icons and tooltypes.

no blow up.

Yes I know just becuase it has never happened to me doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

But please before reporting anything as a bug please do the following.
use a clean OS4 hard drive with all updates applied.
THIS MEANS NO DOPUS OR ANY other "MUST HAVE SOFTWARE" installed.

Sorry to get exasperated or sound doubting but this has been a prevailing theme in my entire Amiga experience. User complains about program X swears up and down, hope to die, that they have a clean machine and when I go to look at machine they have birdie /argue/dopus installed.

I have a multiple OS4 partitions one is OS4 final nothing done to it and the other is an expiremental version to try different thing.

If you need help setting up multiple boot partitions with Kicklayout let me know.

kgrach

Last edited by kgrach on 19-Jul-2008 at 09:15 PM.
Last edited by kgrach on 19-Jul-2008 at 09:10 PM.

@ZeroG

Quote:

Thats nothing new for me, CrossDOS works fine for reading, but it will kill your files if you try to write something. I have tested it with a 512MB Stick, a 2GB MicroSD card, and two HDD (300GB and 500GB).

It has been fine up to now for writing although I was just copying files across. I have used a 512MB and 1GB stick with no worries. But this 4GB stick was broken! Can CrossDOS handle 4GB, did that break it?

Quote:

It is reported as FAT2 because your software prints the 0x32 as ASCII-character.CrossDOS does support FAT32 but its simply broken.

I see. I had hoped it would better. So I have to reformat as FAT16?

@Hypex

The OS4 version of CrossDOS runs perfectly fine with FAT32 and has done for years. I also use it frequently to transfer files from HDD and USB memory sticks. There are no problems with reading or writing files and/or directories.
In fact I regularly:
* take the memory card from my camera;
* plug it into a USB card reader;
* get photos off the card;
* erase the photos after reading them;
* put the empty card back in the camera.
- and never have a problem. I have even added icons for the directories on the card and snapshot them so that I can open them directly on the WB.

Now I can't claim to have personal experience with files >4 GB, but I'm sure that several betatesters that I can think of would have screamed blue murder if the "problems" described here were true.

_________________
cheers
tony

Hyperion Support Forum: http://forum.hyperion-entertainment.biz/index.php

@tonyw

Agreed, I have a myriad of sticks including a 16MB stick which works no problem.

ace

I use 1, 2 and 8 gig sticks all the time.

When you will fall on your face is when you get those "no name"
brand sticks that don't have an LED lamp on them.

If you unplug the drive before it finishes writing, I found that
everything disappears, or the entire drive becomes "invalid"
after that, and you will have to perform a fresh format.

So, be VERY carefull after writing to it, make sure the access LED
is completely finished flashing before you unplug it.

@Hypex

Quote:

It has been fine up to now for writing although I was just copying files across. I have used a 512MB and 1GB stick with no worries. But this 4GB stick was broken! Can CrossDOS handle 4GB, did that break it?

I've seen similar reports on the OS4 ML and had the same problems problems myself. I wanted to use a memory stick to back up some of my partitions and experienced failures with any sticks that were FAT formatted. I can't say what the source of the problem is but there is one. The only way I have been able to use a stick for large backups is to format the stick with SFS.

After my first stick failure, I did a lot of testing and noticed that the results varied with the type of copying I did. The AmigaDOS "copy" command seems to provide the best results with a FAT formatted stick. Copying with WorkBench (drag n drop), AsyncWB (drag n drop) or Dopus4 all fail in some different way. One major problem I encountered was if my source directories contained links (especially soft-links), AsyncWB will report "error while copying - packet request type unknown" and any further copying I attempt will trash the mem stick unless I remove it and reboot. I've also encountered problems based on filenames. Amiga will accept characters in filenames that seem to cause a copy failure to a FAT partition. I'm not sure if filename length has any effect. These kinds of copy failures seem to leave a FAT partition in a state that will lead to drive failure if additional copies or file manipulation is attempted before rebooting. The problem might not be with CrossDOS itself.

Someone else stated that such errors would have been noticed by the beta testers and that there is no CrossDOS problem. I just noticed that the AmigaDOS "info" command reports the wrong "used" and "free" memory on an FFS partition. If the beta testers are so reliable, I wonder how that bug made it into OS4 final??

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X1000 with 2GB memory & OS4.1FE

@colinw

It's off-topic but while doing a USB memory stick test, I noticed that the AmigaDOS "info" command seems to report the wrong "used" and "free" sizes when compared to WorkBench. The "info" sizes appear to be about half of what WorkBench reports.

Here is the report for my OS4: partition:

4.RAD-Disk:> info OS4:
Mounted disks:
Unit Size Used Free Full Errors Status Name
DH0: 1,023M 75,426 448,622 14% 0 Read Only OS4

WorkBench shows:

876.2MB free, 147.3MB in use

Maybe you could take a look at this before 4.1 is released??

Last edited by Xenic on 21-Jul-2008 at 03:58 PM.

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X1000 with 2GB memory & OS4.1FE

@stefanor

Quote:

Possibly the use of Fat95 could help? I am using it in R/W mode on a 1GB CompactFlash card connected via CF-2-SCSI adaptor.

I hoped it wouldn't come to that. On a 68k Amiga you have to do that running OS3. But on OS4 when I saw CrossDOS was improved and supported long file names I was both shecked and elated! However I don't like the negative tones I am hearing now.

@kgrach

Quote:

Confused I am.I use thumb drives as my main source of transfering files.I drag and drop to my thumb drives all day long and have never ever blew up a thumb drive. Actually that is not true XP once did one in and one stopped working after a hot tub incident.

Hehe.

Quote:

I am also hearing talk of fat this and that and crossdos. Uhh you by chance didn't have a 3.9 poseidon lapse and install things thinking they were needed to get thumb drives working in OS4.0

A poseidon lapsse, this is getting funny. No I've never modified the OS4 USB stack nor desired doing so.

Quote:

with the current 4.0 You DON"T NEED TO DO ANYTHING TO GET THUMB DRIVES TO WORK.

YES I KNOW, they have always worked for me. Until hardware or software bugs showed up but until now I found the recent USB to be very stable.

Quote:

If you stuck fat95 into your machine or did a crossdos configure that might have alot to do with your problem.

No I haven't touched it. How can CrossDOS be configured? It sounds like an angry program.

Quote:

THIS MEANS NO DOPUS OR ANY other "MUST HAVE SOFTWARE" installed.

Really? So not even running a program can stuff the system up, just having an assign to it's directory can ruin the system? You don't make OS4 sound liek a very stable OS if a simple assign can bring it down.

@kgrach

Quote:

Yes I know just becuase it has never happened to me doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

My experience with this leads me to believe that an error in copying, saving etc. to a FAT formatted stick leads to a stick failure if you continue to modify or copy files on the stick. I suggest that you try adding some links (hard and soft), maximum length filenames & filenames with unusual characters to a partition and try some copying to a FAT formatted 8GB stick. If the copy fails for some reason, you might see a stick failure if you continue copying to the stick without rebooting first. Then again, maybe not; we might be doing something else wrong or have some bad software installed.

_________________
X1000 with 2GB memory & OS4.1FE

@tonyw

Quote:

The OS4 version of CrossDOS runs perfectly fine with FAT32 and has done for years. I also use it frequently to transfer files from HDD and USB memory sticks. There are no problems with reading or writing files and/or directories. In fact I regularly: * take the memory card from my camera; * plug it into a USB card reader; * get photos off the card; * erase the photos after reading them; * put the empty card back in the camera.

That sounds exactly what I have been doing.

Quote:

- and never have a problem. I have even added icons for the directories on the card and snapshot them so that I can open them directly on the WB.

And this. Except I was adding icons and then changing tooltypes when I broke it.

Quote:

Now I can't claim to have personal experience with files >4 GB, but I'm sure that several betatesters that I can think of would have screamed blue murder if the "problems" described here were true.

My drive is 4GB, my files about 11MB and my added icons would be even smaller! Infact adding icons would just add new files to the disk so I don't know what broke it.

@Xenic

Quote:

I suggest that you try adding some links (hard and soft), maximum length filenames & filenames with unusual characters to a partition

Remember that not everybody on earth is speaking english and what can be considered "unusual characters" by english speakers can be "very usual characters" for other
That said, I only once saw a completely unusable key after a copy, however that was on a "no name" key that also had problems under Windows (in fact it seems that some part of the key lead to a stick stall when writing to it, I solved that by keeping a file that triggered the problem even if I don't need it anymore : now I know the dubious place of the stick is used . Other than that despite using some "unusual characters" like the 'ç' in "français" which seems to be really not appreciated by the filesystem (the drawer appears with another char in place of 'ç', I think it's '§' and is *inaccessible* under Windows, I get a "file not found" style error) everything seems Ok.

EDIT: in fact I'm guessing that every chars > 128 in the filename will lead to problems...

Last edited by abalaban on 21-Jul-2008 at 04:27 PM.

_________________
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Now dreaming AOS 4.2...
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@colinw

Quote:

I use 1, 2 and 8 gig sticks all the time.

Aha! but what about 4?

Quote:

When you will fall on your face is when you get those "no name"brand sticks that don't have an LED lamp on them.

As stated it was a Verbatim and it does have an LED on it. However,I was wondering if it was a "too cheap' Verbatim as I got it for a good price that I have never seen since.

Quote:

If you unplug the drive before it finishes writing, I found thateverything disappears, or the entire drive becomes "invalid"after that, and you will have to perform a fresh format.

I always wait. I treat it like a floppy.

Quote:

So, be VERY carefull after writing to it, make sure the access LED is completely finished flashing before you unplug it.

I do. What is strange is that I plugged my 2GB Kingston in and files seemed to disappear as well as files names being corrupted and MSDOS 8.3 NAME~ type names were appearing. I had to repair it in a Mac before it got worse. This non-related to my 4GB drive but come to think of it, I was testing it in an A1G3-SE machine. Is a 600Mhz A1 known to destroy USB drives?