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/  Forum Index
   /  Amiga OS4.x \ Workbench 4.x
      /  FAT and NTFS on OS4?
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Deniil715 
FAT and NTFS on OS4?
Posted on 19-Feb-2019 11:00:36
#1 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 14-May-2003
Posts: 4236
From: Sweden

I have two questions:

1.
Is >2GB file size for the FAT file system driver for OS4 be fixed any time? I tried to copy a file that was 2.5GB to a USB stick and it copies fine, it seems, but I can't read the file (video clip) afterwards. A PC said the USB stick was currupted and wanted to fix it. The file had the correct size, it seemed, but I suspect the content might have been wrapped around, or the last 0.5GB became garbage or something.

Unfortunately FTP doesn't work either, because those clients/servers has the same limit. I ended up having to split the file in two, and then write a program on windows to join them again before copying to the USB stick

2.
How stable is the NTFS file system for OS4? I want to backup a lot of images and smaller video clips onto an external harddrive (my wife's) formatted with NTFS, but I don't want to risk destroying the data on it in the process.

Anyone with experience here?

_________________
- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

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Hypex 
Re: FAT and NTFS on OS4?
Posted on 19-Feb-2019 15:44:15
#2 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@Deniil715

1. A look on my system reveals no FAT and only CrossDOS in L. Could it be they are still using an old CrossDOS FAT driver? Looks like they need exFAT to solve this.

2. I found it stable enough to read files. But I haven't done much writing. I do it sometimes but tend to avoid it. Right now, writing any files to an external drive, be that FAT or NTFS is unsafe. It is unsafe because the drives cannot be unmounted. After it copies files it does not set the clean bit. OS4 needs to a context menu to eject it.

I don't know if the Dismount command can unmount it cleanly. But needing to unmount using a shell command is ridiculous.

So it's good to have NTFS support but they need to add proper disk unmounting before it can be considered safe to use.

This may be looked upon or looked down as just another "shutdown procedure" and in a small way it is. But this is just the way it is. Removable drives using PC and Amiga filesystems need to be unmounted.

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Deniil715 
Re: FAT and NTFS on OS4?
Posted on 20-Feb-2019 8:30:06
#3 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 14-May-2003
Posts: 4236
From: Sweden

@Hypex

1.
Yes, maybe CrossDOS hasn't been updated for an eternity? That would explain why it would have a 2GB limit, while FAT itself has a 4GB limit.

How hard can it be for people to use unsigned long when writing stuff like this. Or size_t for that matter...

2.
I think these implementations flush everything quite regularly and not keeping unwritten caches for more than very few seconds. Unplugging 5 seconds after that last activity "blink" is enough for both Amiga and other FSs methinks.

_________________
- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

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salass00 
Re: FAT and NTFS on OS4?
Posted on 20-Feb-2019 9:21:16
#4 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 31-Oct-2003
Posts: 2707
From: Finland

@Deniil715

Quote:

1.
Yes, maybe CrossDOS hasn't been updated for an eternity? That would explain why it would have a 2GB limit, while FAT itself has a 4GB limit.

How hard can it be for people to use unsigned long when writing stuff like this. Or size_t for that matter...


It doesn't matter what types are used internally when the API of the legacy ACTION_SEEK packet doesn't allow for file sizes >= 2GiB.

To allow for bigger files at least some of the new 64-bit packets would have to be supported.

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Hypex 
Re: FAT and NTFS on OS4?
Posted on 21-Feb-2019 15:57:11
#5 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@Deniil715

1. It's been around for years. If it hasn't been updated then likely it still uses the 32-bit API.

Wasn't the 2GB a DOS thing? I recall something in the API using signed LONG. So a fatal design decision it seems.

2. It usually is flushed out after a few seconds. No different to FFS becoming invalidated when "pulling out" too early. However, it's more than the data safely being written. It's being properly unmounted. The same as when you usually wouldn't pull a USB stick out from a PC even after waiting a few seconds.

It can give trouble. A real example. I wrote some files to a USB stick. Linux kernel files for my X1000. I reboot into CFE. Plug in said stick. The new files were missing. Other times it says drive is corrupt. I wrote the files on OS4. It wasn't cleanly unmounted. So, CFE bugs aside, it can cause problems.

Last edited by Hypex on 21-Feb-2019 at 03:59 PM.

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bennymee 
Re: FAT and NTFS on OS4?
Posted on 21-Feb-2019 20:54:14
#6 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 19-Aug-2003
Posts: 696
From: Netherlands

@Deniil715

1.
I think if it was 4GB, we could complain again, but it is better then 2 :)

2.
When making a backup of my Workbench partition to my new 32GB USB stick formatted with Fat32 everything is copied without problems in a ~3 hours.


But with the same stick formatted with NTFS in Windows 10, I have errors with copying (could not copy, not specified) and it is very slow. So slow that the file Odyssey/dividerNavigationItem.js is busy copying for several minutes (with the filemanager 'Filer' ). With this speed it takes several days to copy the whole partition :(
Allso the whole system is slowing down as well, I don't know what the problem is. System utilisation is only ~20%.






Last edited by bennymee on 21-Feb-2019 at 08:55 PM.

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