Hi,

I recently came across an apparent incompatibility in the handling of RDB disks between MorphOS and OS4. As I'm not sure if this is a bug (in one or the other OS) or the result of a divergence in standards, I thought I should share my experience.

I used HDConfig on MorphOS 3.7 to create a partition in the unused space at the end of my SAM440's system disk. The disk was attached to my MorphOS machine (Peg-II) through a SATA to USB converter. When I attempted to boot the SAM from this disk afterwards, it couldn't find the SLB (second-level bootloader), so HDConfig had apparently clobbered it. Would it be possible for HDConfig to preserve the SLB information in the RDB, or is OS4 embedding the SLB in a hacky or non-standard way that the devs don't want to support?

A related problem was that OS4's Media Toolbox reported this RDB error: "rdb_RDBBlocksHi is too low: 2063. It should be 1529977020." Is it right?

In retrospect I realise what I did was probably silly, but I still think it's an edge case worth mentioning. I also realise that if there *are* any bugs here, they may have been fixed in more recent versions.

BTW, when I clicked on the empty space and selected to create one partition with the ~129GB available, I wasn't initially warned that the partition was too big for SFS (which was chosen by default IIRC). The size warning tooltip only appeared after I selected another FS for the partition and then switched back to SFS.

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Are you saying you are booting MorphOS on your Sam440 system? I thought the Sam440 was unsupported on MorphOS that's all!
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I take it you are aware that the OS4/68k SFS, certainly v2, is incompatible with MorphOS's version of SFS AFAIK!

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I think this is probably an issue with using the MorphOS specific version of SFS instead of the OS4/68k version. I seem to remember there are major differences with the 2 filesystems - same name, but very confusing that they are now so very much different from one another - IIRC.
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I'm not sure frankly, as I don't use the 68k or OS4 SFS filesystems currently, only the MorphOS SFS version. Though maybe someone else in the forum will be able to offer you a more complete response on this topic to you.
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As I said, I think it's incompatibilities between the 2 systems, as you don't see on Aminet that SFS is shown as compatible (no butterfly logo) next to the 68k/OS4 versions of SFS, so that is definitely a clue. I can't currently find the link that mentions the 2 versions are incompatible, but I think that is where the issue lies, sadly for you.
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Usually as you try to save a partition on a HDD that is too large to be formatted by SFS on MorphOS you get a warning, but initial sizing does not generate a warning - IIRC.

> Are you saying you are booting MorphOS on your Sam440 system?

As I understand it, he removed the internal SATA HDD from his Sam440, put it in a USB enclosure, connected the enclosure to a USB port of his Pegasos II, booted MorphOS from the internal drive, made the described changes to the external HDD from within MorphOS HDConfig, removed the enclosure from the Pegasos II, removed the HDD from the enclosure, put the HDD into his Sam440 and attempted to boot OS4 from it, which failed with an RDB error (but which, in theory, should have worked as he just created an additional partition in the unused space without touching the existing OS4 ones).

Sorry, I don't know how to solve it. Best way is backup and made partitioning from scratch.

In any case, it is a good idea to use for partitioning only disk tools from one operation system on single disk (or better one tool only).
In the past, I had problems even with mixing tools from Linux and MacOSX on one HDD.
Also on Pegasos 2 mixing HDconfig and MediaToolbox produces some warnings.

@ncafferkey
Maybe some undefined behavior of RDB. How about a bug report?