@Hypex

Quote:

Quote: I use 1, 2 and 8 gig sticks all the time. Aha! but what about 4?

If I'm not mistaking I think Collin is also from Australia, maybe you can arrange a meeting in order for him to test your usb stick and eventually find a problem ? of course that's only possible if you are not living at opposite side from each other.

_________________
AOS 4.1 : I dream it, Hyperion did it !
Now dreaming AOS 4.2...
Thank you to all devs involved for this great job !

@Xenic

Quote:

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.

How interesting. So not even FFS is trusted! The only way I would back up to a USB drive is if I archived the files in LhA. I wouldn't trust Amiga files in a PC filesystem. Mostly why we don't use FAT as an actual partition type. A guy in my club one asked why we just don't use the PC FAT format for Amiga paritions. I thought about it and went into it with a good answer. The first point would be that although PC floppies and USB drives are detected on the Amiga am actual FAT HD parition is not. I set one up, to share with Linux/MoL, I could not get it to work.

Quote:

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

Come to think of it, long file copies have failed on my system sometimes. Actually I was copying large (11MB) files from the flash to RAM and it did stall. I do remember just copying the files individually.

Although I burnt a few on the fly to an audio CD with MakeCD and that worked! They are MP3's, so in 68k I could read off the files, convert to raw and burn them as a CD track. So if thast worked there's a problem somewhere! I will note that after a few tracks the CDRW drive froze with a red light, but I think that is due to a scratched CDRW, my CD player refused to read it when I added more tracks!

Quote:

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??

I think this was explained somewhere, here perhaps.

@abalaban

Quote:

If I'm not mistaking I think Collin is also from Australia, maybe you can arrange a meeting in order for him to test your usb stick and eventually find a problem ? of course that's only possible if you are not living at opposite side from each other.

Yes he his. In another state up north. "Upstate" in American speak I suppose. But. he might be able to also find the drive I bought and test it out.

Hi @Hypex

...But I didn't think it would destroy the whole drive along with all the data on it!
Sure it could, it over wrote FAT somewhere with the '.info' file. I can only say of my own experiences with USB flash drives that SanDisk drives work the best. Somebody gave me a 1GB Lexar Firefly to try out. It works fine on any PC, but the A1 won't even read it. Why? Probably some physical devience I guess.

_________________

@abalaban

Quote:

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

Probably so, but I've had problems with chars < 128 too. In fact I just renamed a file with an asterisc ( * ) in the filename on a FAT formatted memory stick and can't delete, copy or move the file. I tried shell commands, Dopus4 and WorkBench but the file won't budge. I can delete such a file on an FFS or SFS partition but not on the mem stick. There are probably other chars that will produce the same result and might lead to a stick failure eventually. Maybe I will be able to get rid of the file if I reboot. If not, I guess it will take a reformatting of the stick.

_________________
X1000 with 2GB memory & OS4.1FE

@Hypex

The installed "must have utilities" I was talking about was system hacks that modify the system. Also sometimes programs misbehave and replace system libraries.

Dopus was notorious for causing havoc on AOS 3.X systems. Read lots of little odd bugs.
Like yam sending your entire directory when you forward just one file.

I don't know about the open source version as I still have a prejudice against Dopus from that time plus it just aggravated me that a stupid file lister doesn't do the only thing I would find useful to have a file lister. That is for it to list the file version. it will open a separate window and give version which is cumbersome and not useful for comparing directories.

@all

The reason you really don't want to use fat or NTFS on an Amiga system is the 128 character limit. You will notice the long file names on a PC only work if they are in your root directory drag that same file to your documents drawer that is buried and bam things stop working.

Try reading an Amiga CD in a PC and you will discover that file names get truncated in the deeper directories and deep directories disappear.

U3 thumbdrives don't work on Amigas unless you remove the U3 stuff.

Just a note USB and most of the system has been updated for AOS4.1

kgrach

@kgrach

Quote:

The reason you really don't want to use fat or NTFS on an Amiga system is the 128 character limit. You will notice the long file names on a PC only work if they are in your root directory drag that same file to your documents drawer that is buried and bam things stop working.

That's probably the main reason for corrupted flash drives, then.

Quote:

Try reading an Amiga CD in a PC and you will discover that file names get truncated in the deeper directories and deep directories disappear.

Something else, I didn't know about, which could also cause the corruption, I have seen.

It is these sort of anomolies that someone needs to write down, and make available to other OS4 users. Maybe on somwhere such as Intuition base.

Quote:

U3 thumbdrives don't work on Amigas unless you remove the U3 stuff.

I have a Cruzer U3 Micro 2.0GB which works fine on OS4.0, and still has the U3 stuff on it.

Quote:

Just a note USB and most of the system has been updated for AOS4.1 kgrach

Thanks for that titbit.

_________________
Peter Swallow.
A1XEG3-800 [IBM 750FX PowerPC], running OS4.1FE, using ac97 onboard sound.

"There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't."

@Swoop

I had a cheap sub $15 dollar 2 gig U3 drive awhile back and it just kept showing up as a non writable CDROM drive on my A1. It also annoyed me every time I stuck it into a pc with the loading crude. So I downloaded the remove U3 tool from U3 and not only does it now work better on my PC and Amiga it has more room.

So I no longer have any U3 drives to test on my miggy.

Yea that character limit on file names confused my PC friend with a Demo music CD.
He couldn't understand why the music played fine on the CD but as soon as he dragged it to my music drawer in his documents it wouldn't play. He thought it was some kind of copy protection since he also couldn't rename the super long names. I simply put the album drawer in his C directory and everything played fine.

kgrach

The PC File restriction trip up people all the time

NOTE THESE LISTED BELOW ARE PC RESTRICTIONS AND NOT AMIGA OS RESTRICTIONS

just to help clarify and prevent misunderstandings

The Reserved Characters and Names in windows

Most common characters can be used in naming files. However, the following characters are reserved and cannot be used in a file name:
< > : " / \ | ? *
Also, neither a space nor a period can be used at the end of a name. Further, files cannot have the following reserved device names: CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9. Note that the case does not matter in Windows.

Limits on the Length of File Names and Paths

The absolute limit imposed by Windows. The operating system API puts a limit (called MAX_PATH) of 260 characters for the complete name with the path included. However, actual limits are smaller because of various other restrictions. For example, all names have to have a null terminator at the end. Normally only the computer sees this end marker but it counts as a character so there are really only 259 characters available. Another three characters are used by the drive or volume designation (e.g., C:\). Thus, the limit for naming all the folders and subfolders plus the file is reduced to 256 characters. However, no individual file or folder can have a name longer than 255 characters. This includes spaces and back slashes used as separators. This limit of 255 characters per object is imposed by the way that Windows encodes characters but other considerations usually impose lower limits.

For one, there is a restriction that reduces the limit on the number of characters used for the path because it is the standard practice in Windows 32-bit systems to create an alternate short name in the old 8.3 format for all files. This means that at least 12 characters must be set aside for the file name. This leaves a maximum 244 characters for naming all folders and subfolders. This last limitation is often overlooked.

Although it is stated that a file name can have up to 255 characters, this will generally be possible only if the file is in the root directory. As a practical matter, most file names will be limited to a smaller number because the number of characters needed for the names of any containing folders and their back-slash separators must be taken into account.

Also important to note the Microsoft Juliet CD format only allows 127 character depth
But due to a bug on XP SP2 and windows 2003 SP2 CD's burnt by these operating systems have a name limit of 108 characters anything longer gets truncated.

but then again on microsofts website you will note plenty of discrepencies.

For MYSQL MS suggest path lengths shorter than 160 characters and in the multilingual pack microsoft say's limit the length of install to 105 characters and not to exceed 128 characters in total length in any path.

kgrach

Last edited by kgrach on 22-Jul-2008 at 04:30 AM.

@Hypex

I use two 512 MByte Lexar JumpDrive Elite USB sticks and a 512 MByte Kingston DataTraveler USB stick. One of the JumpDrives is formatted for FastFileSystem. The other JumpDrive is formatted for FAT32. The DataTraveler is formatted for some version of FAT, not sure which.

The JumpDrive that is formatted for FFS works like a charm with AmigaOS 4.0 July 2007 Update and FFS2Fix.

I am very careful with one formatted as FAT32, because I had some problems in the very distant past with the Lexar JumpDrives when they were both formatted for FAT32.

The Kingston DataTraveler seems to be more robust than the Lexar JumpDrive. However, it is only about a year old. I am also very careful with it as well.

---
redfox


PS

Long ago, back in the very distant past, I had some problems with the Lexar JumpDrives. My MicroA1 killed them off a few times, and I found that my old HP pc could wake them up again. I do not know what caused the problems. That is why I am very careful with the one formatted for FAT32. Since I formatted the one for FFS, it worked fine.

---update---
After re-reading kgrach's replies above, I think he has explained the problems I had with the Lexar JumpDrive USB sticks.
Thanks kgrach.

Last edited by redfox on 28-Jul-2008 at 07:28 PM.
Last edited by redfox on 22-Jul-2008 at 05:21 AM.

@Xenic

Quote:

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??

It's not a bug, you're just not reading it properly and jumping to conclusions.
"Info" reports "Free" and "Used" in blocks, not bytes. Multiply by the blocksize and you'll get the answer you expect.

_________________
cheers
tony

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

@kgrach

Quote:

I had a cheap sub $15 dollar 2 gig U3 drive awhile back and it just kept showing up as a non writable CDROM drive on my A1. It also annoyed me every time I stuck it into a pc with the loading crude. So I downloaded the remove U3 tool from U3 and not only does it now work better on my PC and Amiga it has more room. So I no longer have any U3 drives to test on my miggy.

I have experienced that in past, and I even returned a U3 usb stick in the past, when U3 first became available. I cannot remember which update fixed it, but on OS4 Final U3 stuff is ignored, and the flash drive is recognised correctly.
On my PC the U3 drive is recognised as both a usb stick and a cd drive. The u3 part is mounted as a cd. Weird how windows thought U3 was such a big improvement, allowing programs to be run from an external device without installing them first. We've been able to do that on the Amiga for decades.

_________________
Peter Swallow.
A1XEG3-800 [IBM 750FX PowerPC], running OS4.1FE, using ac97 onboard sound.

"There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't."

@Swoop

Quote:

Weird how windows thought U3 was such a big improvement, allowing programs to be run from an external device without installing them first. We've been able to do that on the Amiga for decades.

Yeah you are right looking in my Dev CD i can find this :
Quote:

PCMCIA AmigaXIP Execute-in-place code ===================================== (c) Copyright 1991-1992 Commodore-Amiga, Inc. All Rights Reserved

So that makes almost 17 years the concept was thought by Commodore's engineers

_________________
AOS 4.1 : I dream it, Hyperion did it !
Now dreaming AOS 4.2...
Thank you to all devs involved for this great job !

@tonyw

Quote:

It's not a bug, you're just not reading it properly and jumping to conclusions."Info" reports "Free" and "Used" in blocks, not bytes. Multiply by the blocksize and you'll get the answer you expect.

You're right. I jumped to a stupid conclusion because "info" previously showed values that seemed to be the same as the size in bytes. My block size was set to 1024 for all my partitions so the numbers looked like bytes with the decimal point shifted. Since switching to 2048 block size, the values don't match.

Entering "info SHOW SIZE" gives me the correct size in bytes (KB, MB). One could argue that the default should be the same as the "SIZE" listed for the device. That's a minor nitpic though.

_________________
X1000 with 2GB memory & OS4.1FE

HI @kgrach

Limits on the Length of File Names and Paths

I tried to copy my SDK and blew in PERL. It's very deep in subdirectories. The tree extends beyond 10. Is there a limit how deep FAT32 will go with subdirectories & their subs?

Thanks for the info!

_________________

@ZeroG

Quote:

ZeroG wrote: @Hypex ... 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).

Errrrrrrmmmmmm - excuse my stupid question - but why do you want to use CrossDOS at all for your USB memory stick?

It may be due to my weak memory - but I cannot remember ever having used CrossDOS to access any USB mass storage device on my A4000PPC.

I just plug it in and can read from it or write to it flawlessly (under OS 3.9/WarpOS).

Quote:

ZeroG wrote: ... CrossDOS does support FAT32 but its simply broken.

I own CrossDOS 7 gold (registered version) - but I cannot confirm your statement.
For me CrossDOS 7 worked flawlessly up to now...

_________________
Ciao

Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

@Snuffy

Quote:

Sure it could, it over wrote FAT somewhere with the '.info' file. I can only say of my own experiences with USB flash drives that SanDisk drives work the best. Somebody gave me a 1GB Lexar Firefly to try out. It works fine on any PC, but the A1 won't even read it. Why? Probably some physical devience I guess.

Some cheap drives caused problems. Usually attaching with me.

Well, on the two other drives I have, I have written .info files when I dragged icons and directories over and they were fine. I also checked one that has a "FAT2" filesystem so I don't see what could be the problem here. Info files work. They have before. It's just an extension, more than three characters, but an extension.

@kgrach

Quote:

The installed "must have utilities" I was talking about was system hacks that modify the system. Also sometimes programs misbehave and replace system libraries.Dopus was notorious for causing havoc on AOS 3.X systems. Read lots of little odd bugs.Like yam sending your entire directory when you forward just one file.

Okay that makes more sense.

I haven't heard about these DOpus bugs before.

Quote:

I don't know about the open source version as I still have a prejudice against Dopus from that time plus it just aggravated me that a stupid file lister doesn't do the only thing I would find useful to have a file lister. That is for it to list the file version. it will open a separate window and give version which is cumbersome and not useful for comparing directories.

Yeah I have a few gripes with it. Forget what they are now but little things do annoy me.

@kgrach

Quote:

Although it is stated that a file name can have up to 255 characters, this will generally be possible only if the file is in the root directory. As a practical matter, most file names will be limited to a smaller number because the number of characters needed for the names of any containing folders and their back-slash separators must be taken into account.

So there was more to it! 255 chars seemed impossible back in'95. I thought it made the Amiga look bad but not necessarily. Especially with a path limit of 255 chars!

Quote:

Also important to note the Microsoft Juliet CD format only allows 127 character depthBut due to a bug on XP SP2 and windows 2003 SP2 CD's burnt by these operating systems have a name limit of 108 characters anything longer gets truncated.

What a coincidence. The max filemane length for OS4 is 108 characters. Actually any Amiga filesystem can use 108 characters, it's in the API. Although other parts of the OS were restricted to 32. But even so, 32 freeflow was better than 8.3 capitals only.

@kgrach

Quote:

I simply put the album drawer in his C directory and everything played fine.

Could this have been worked around? Does FAT support softlinks? If hidden directories were put in the root they could have linked to others deeper in the drive which contained large file names and worked around this.

Okay, that would be a bitof a hack but hasn't FAT been a bit of a hack since it "supported" 255 char files names?

I don't know why I have to put up with it. If I could put a more modern FS on there like Mac HFS this would be less of a problem. Does CrossDOS support HFS? Does the Mac have any ports of FFS or SFS?