I finally got back to my experiments in regards to setting up Amiga 68k hard drives under MorphOS. The reason being is that I use CF and SD cards as hard drives, and as most people know by now, the most common method for prepping these drives has been to use WinUAE which can go over well, or can be very difficult with read/write complications and what have you.

Regardless, it would be nice not to have to use Windows or UAE for that matter, but just putting the CF in your Amiga and using HDTool does not always do the trick, sometimes it will not even see the card till you've prepared things under WinUAE.

So what I did was hook up my CF card to a USB reader, plugged it into my Efika, used the MorphOS's Hard Drive Tool to delete all partitions, create new ones using PFS3, and of course to set the BOOT, Mount, and Max Transfer settings to how they should be.

Having done this, then formatted, I can take the drive back to my Amiga, boot up with the Work Bench 3.1 disk and load HDTools and see that the partitions are there, but are not showing up under Work Bench.

My guess here is that the SFS and PFS3 versions that MorphOS is using are not the 68k compatible ones but are instead suited for PPC machines?

What I did in an attempt to resolve this was create an Amiga boot disk, and install PFS020FS into the "L" folder, along with the PFS variation of HDTools, and the other required files.

I booted my Amiga with this disk, changed the File System over to the PFS3020DS on the disk, and renamed it to match the naming that MorphOS used.

All I had to do then was save the Hard Drive changes, reboot, and behold, I see partitions ready to be written to!!!

So my question: Is it possible to somehow skip the last step, bypass creating a custom PFS3 boot disk for WB3.1, and instead apply the PFS020DS file system to the hard drive within MorphOS instead?

That would come in so handy, but alas I can not use HDTool or the PFS3 variant in MorphOS because they will not detect the drives there. Does MorphOS have a native tool that can handle this? If so can we get one please?! I want to make a Youtube video for the Amiga community but would like things to be as simple as possible.

Thanks!

SFS and PFS in MorphOS are 68k compatible but to boot from said filesystems in AmigaOS you must install said filesystem to RDB or mount it via mountlist and have handler in L: directory on your boot disk. Since MorphOS has built-in support for PFS and SFS it may happen that disk is working in MorphOS but on in AmigaOS.

I've made Amiga CF/SD/HD drives under MorphOS many times. It's really pleasure to unpack complete WHDLoad collections etc on fast machine. And of course MorphOS also preserves Amiga's protection bits and all. So, it's perfect solution :)

What I've done is to separate MorphOS native and 68k filesystem versions. I install 68k filesystems to cards/drives with different identifier so that they won't get mixed. For example when native SFS is SFS/00, I install 68k SFS to disk's RDB as, lets say, SFS/03. Then it's sure that 68k filesystem is used on both MorphOS and real Amiga for that media. Then you don't have to worry if MorphOS native filesystem is compatible for everything or not.

And I do all partitioning etc on MorphOS, just plug the ready card to real Amiga and no need to tune anything on it.

BTW. PFS3DS didn't work here on USB.. probably direct scsi commands don't go through USB correctly. But standard PFS3 and SFS etc have worked just fine.

Strange, I only needed the PFS3020DS to be in the "L" folder on the custom PFS3 boot disk I made to finalize the hard drive.

After having done so, I booted with a standard Wb3.1 install floppy without anything extra in the "L" folder, installed to the hard drive, rebooted, again with nothing in the hard drives "L" folder, and I am fine.

@jPV, can you clarify for me how you set up a separate folder for the 68k/RDB file system on MorphOS and prepared your hard drives with that as opposed to MorphOS' native file systems instead? That's what I need to know, but I don't follow your explanation fully.

Thanks!

Well, basically it goes like this (I don't remember now if all details are like I've done earlier, I don't have time to check or test this on real Amiga now):

1. Change partition layout type to RDB (Picture 1).

2. Click "Edit Filesystems..." (Picture 2).

3. Click "Add...". Select 68k filesystem you have copied somewhere on HD, it doesn't need to be in L: either. Filesystem will be written to destination disk's RDB block, it won't be needed to reside in any directory after it. (Picture 3)

4. Edit filesystem properties on the window which did open after you selected the filesystem file. Most important is to change filesystem to "Custom" and edit its identifier to something which isn't used on native filesystems. In this example I'm adding 68k SFS and change the identifier to SFS/05 which is in hex 0x53465305. 05 is just big enough which won't mess with usual 00 or OS4's 02 etc. (Picture 4)

5. Save changes and create a new partition. Change partition's filesystem to "Custom" and use the same identifier you used before, in this case 0x53465305. For Amiga use, remember to change max transfer to 0x1fe00 (Picture 5)

6. Save changes and maybe better replug the drive. Quick format the created partition(s).

Drive should be ready to be plugged in on Amiga. There's no need to have filesystem as visible file anywhere now on, because filesystem has been saved to the drive's RDB and it'll work anywhere you plug the drive in.

Thank you kind sir, I'll prolly have a go at this tonight!


Quote:

Quote:

I'm trying to use this guide to format a 8 GB that I want to use with a SCSI2SD micro SD adapter in a real Amiga (3000), but I can't find in my system the 68K filesystem, for step 3 in jPV's guide, at least is not in SYS:L/

Could someone tell where to look for it?

>> 3. Click "Add...". Select 68k filesystem you have copied somewhere on HD

> I can't find in my system the 68K filesystem [...]
> Could someone tell where to look for it?

As step 3 says, you have to copy it there beforehand.

Quote:

You need to copy it from an Amiga or the OS3.9 CD.

Quote:

Thank you Intuition. I must be going blind, because I didn't find in the text where it says "that is written in Step 3."

The filesystem I used in the example is found here: http://strohmayer.org/sfs/files/SFS_1.279_68k.lha

I just copied the SmartFilesystem file found in the archive as SmartFilesystem1279_68k to SYS:L/.

Quote:

Awesome.

I found your installation guide in the Library section. It was very helpful and easy to follow. I got the job done. I haven't tested it in my real Amiga 3000, since I will do the installation of my SCSI2SD micro SD adapter this weekend, with more time.

Thank you very much.

[ Edited by WeiXing3D 07.03.2016 - 21:48 ]