I have a uA1c with OS4.1 on it and some rack mounted removable hard drives. I recently got a 500GB drive and mounted it in a tray and plugged it in. I went into media toolbox and tried partitioning it with some 60 GB partitions (FFS with long filenames, DOS\07). After saving and rebooting when I tried a quick format I got an error that said "Volume in device RH0 has write error on disk block xxxxxx". After playing around with the size of the partition, I can get a partition of about 13 GB or so to format OK, but larger ones keep giving me errors.

I'm very confused. I have some other 250 GB removable drives with 33 GB partitions (DOS\07) on them that are working just fine. Does anyone have any thoughts as to what is happening here?

@Ned

If it's a used drive, it could be bad. A full format will mark out bad blocks, but I'd imagine that would take a long time. If that worked & it starts to develop more errors, then the drive is dying.

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Hate tends to make you look stupid...

@Ned

edit ... ... sundown responded while I was typing.

Please follow his advice, because that is what happened with my old Maxtor hard drive.

/edit

I have never used partitions that large on my OS4 system, so I'm not sure if there is a partition size limit. My original hard drive was a 40GB Maxtor hard drive with a single partition of a little more than 35GB (FFS with long filenames, DOS\07). It died just after I upgraded to OS4.1. It was a very old drive that had run for many years on a pc and about 3 years on my MicroA1, so I do not think it had anything to do with OS4.1. My current hard drive is a 250GB Western Digital hard drive, with two 2GB partitions, a 5GB partition, a 35GB partition and the rest spare.

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redfox

Last edited by redfox on 14-Aug-2009 at 03:44 AM.
Last edited by redfox on 14-Aug-2009 at 03:42 AM.

@sundown
Quote:

sundown wrote: @Ned If it's a used drive, it could be bad. A full format will mark out bad blocks, but I'd imagine that would take a long time. If that worked & it starts to develop more errors, then the drive is dying.

I'm not so sure it's the drive. I've been trying to do the same thing today with a brand new Western Digital 320G hardrive and am having the same problem. I've tried all the file systems and all of them have the same problem. I hooked the drive up to a PC and formatted it and wrote to it just fine. I think something is amiss with OS4.1 but I can't really be sure. Anybody have any success setting up a partition and formattng it on OS4.1?

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Kevin - X1000 First Contact / uA1

@ktadd

Hmm, I have a 160G drive I intend to replace my 80G with, maybe I should just do it & see what happens.

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Hate tends to make you look stupid...

@ktadd

My drive is also a Western Digital and it is a brand new one so I don't think it is bad. By the way my 250 GB drives that have the 33 GB partitions on them that seem to work just fine are also Western Digital drives.

@Ned

So this was after installing the drive in MTB and all that? Have you tried JXFS to see if it does the same thing? If it isn't the hardware there might be a bug.

Does your debug buffer say anything? I notice MTB likes to use SCSI commands, I am always seeing errors about commands not supported.

Last edited by Hypex on 14-Aug-2009 at 03:39 PM.

@Hypex

No, I have not tried JXFS. I'm willing to give it a try, but I can't seem to find any information on it and how to use it and format a partition for it. Well, I can find the file system type in media toolbox, but that's about it. Can someone direct me to some concrete information on how to use it?

@sundown

Quote:

Hmm, I have a 160G drive I intend to replace my 80G with, maybe I should just do it & see what happens.

So, what happened?

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Moxee
AmigaOne X1000
AmigaOne XE G4
I'd agree with you, but then we'd both be wrong.

@Ned

The 35GB partition on my current hard drive is JXFileSystem (JXF\04).

It is my DH1 partition with volume name Stuff.

Set Filesystem chooser to
Type: JXF\04
Blocksize: 512
Standard filesystem types will be qhosted out
Don't know if the following matters (these values were defaults)
Buffers 600
Maxtransfer 1FE00
Mask FFFFFFFE

There is a little bit of information about Editing Partitions and File Systems in the AmigaOS 4.1 Quickstart Guide on pages 22, 23 and 24. This is the manual that came with the OS4.1 CD.

I've got lots of room on my hard drive, so I will try to create a large partition and report back later. I need to do a backup first on my system partition.

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redfox

@Ned / guys

removable hard drives...

Is this a drive with a removable platter like the Jazz drives from the old days or some kind of hot swappable drive? My hard drive is an ordinary Western Digital hard disk drive mounted permanently in my case. Not sure if this would make any difference.

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redfox

@Moxee

Quote:

So, what happened?

Had laser surgery this (Friday) morning, takes 24 hrs to see right again. I should be able to install the new drive this weekend. It's a Seagate drive & will replace my current backup drive. Plan 2 partitions, 40G & 120G.

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Hate tends to make you look stupid...

@ktadd

I had same problems with my first Maxtor Hard Disk for my Sam and after of many adventures I put one Seagate and it works (I touch wood), I think that OS4.1 works fine with some hard disk (Seagate for example) and with the first partition with the system (DH0:) of few GBbytes, I have it of 5GB in my Seagate of 160GB with other 3 drives partitioned plus the SWAP partition of 10GB.

But I think that the current hard disk problems in much cases the problems are for the same hard disk, currently the hard disk are more low prices than 10 years ago and the quality too is any more low, and I had problems with hard disk with my died PCNotebook too.

@redfox

OK, I'll try to describe it. It consists of two parts. One is what I believe is called the rack which is a 5 1/4 inch form factor and is installed in a slot like a CD ROM. The IDE cable and power cable plug into the back of it. The other part is drive tray into which you mount a 3 1/2 inch IDE drive of whatever size (gigabytes) you wish. The tray slides into the rack, a handle is then pushed down to cause the connector on the tray to seat firmly with the connector on the rack, and then a key is inserted into a lock on the rack and turned to cause it to become active. All this is done with
the power off. When the computer boots up, it then sees this tray mounted drive as just another device.

In my case, I have several tray mounted drives. I use them for backup purposes. I take a full backup of my uA1c every day. I have three trays. I use one for even days, one for odd days, and one for the backup done on the first of the month. Yes, I'm paranoid about loosing data. The exact rack and tray I am using is a Kingwin model KF-21 which I ordered from CompUSA.

My current problem with this 500 GB tray mounted drive is that I am wanting to replace my primary 40 GB IDE drive with a (much) larger one. After getting the new drive partitioned properly and all the partitions copied from my primary drive to this new one, I was then going to remove the drive from the tray, remove my old 40 GB drive, and install the 500 GB drive as the new primary drive. But the partitioning/formatting problems are causing problems at the moment.

@Ned
Quote:

I'm very confused. I have some other 250 GB removable drives with 33 GB partitions (DOS\07) on them that are working just fine. Does anyone have any thoughts as to what is happening here?

I previously used removable hard-disks for backups but switched to SFS formatted USB flash drives (very slow). Keep in mind that the system doesn't see those hard-disks as removable media and treats them just like a permanently installed hard-disk. When I booted my system without the removable hard-disk installed, Media ToolBox would notify me that the disk configuration had been changed and ask if I wanted to write the changes to the RDB. My conclusion was that Media ToolBox is recording information about secondary drives in the RDB of the primary boot disk. I have to wonder if the system can tell the system can tell the difference between removable disks of the same size that use the same partition names etc. Even though you could have a bad drive as others have suggested, I think it's also possible that there is some conflicting information recorded in the RDB.

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X1000 with 2GB memory & OS4.1FE

@Xenic

AFAIK only "Last Unit" is stored in the RDB. If you remove a device, the Last unit flag fails

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@Ned

Does C:DumpDebugBuffer reveal anything?

@redfox

I first learned of these types of removable drives from a friend in our Amiga club. He was using them for his primary boot drive. If you had need for different configurations such as OS4.0, OS4.1, and Linux, you could have one removable drive for each different configuration and simply put in the appropriate tray and drive depending on which configuration you wanted to boot up.

@redfox

I read the stuff in the QuickStart guide which did not tell me much except that JXF\04 existed. I created a 75 GB partition called RH0 which was flagged as automount, saved the changes to disk, and rebooted. I am unable to find this partition. It does not show up on workbench and "info" doesn't seem to know about it either. A "normal" partition would have shown up and simply been marked as not being a DOS disk until I formatted it. So (1) how do I get the partition to show up and (2) once I can find it, do I use the normal "format" command one it or what?

Thanks.

@Ned

JXFS must have a block size of 512 or it won't show up to be formated, a small detail that isn't mentioned in the os4.1 manual.

Ok, installed the 160G drive, installed the SLB & created 2 partitions, a 35GB SFS & a 114GB SFS2. Both showed on the WB & both partitions quick formated just fine. This is a Seagate drive, maybe Western Digital drives are a problem.

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Hate tends to make you look stupid...