Formatting large drives

Is it possible to format a 500GB disc as ADFS, even at reduced capacity?

The disc I’m working with is on SCSIFS on an ARMX6.

The most recent version of HForm says it can only be formatted to somewhere around 256 GB, and offers to do it. When this option is chosen however, after answering the final question it immediately says “Press space to continue” and quits. If I choose Format instead of Initialise there’s about a second’s delay before it quits. In neither case is the disc recognised afterwards.

Is it possible to format a 500GB disc as ADFS, even at reduced capacity?

I suspect that it is, but “partitioning” would make it immediately more viable!

I wonder how that’s going?

To answer my own question – it is possible, using the HForm from the 5.28 disc image. My first attempt was with a version to which I had added an extra warning, and that was the point where it didn’t work. My Bad.

Is it possible to format a 500GB disc as ADFS, even at reduced capacity?

Yes but why? For ARMX6 SATA is the partman stuff availabe.
I use a 500GB SSD with two partitions. Works very nice as you can see on my YTPlay youtubevideo (RISCOS Berlin channel) ;-)
Very short description: You have to format your 500GB device via USB. After restart you have access and can copy all your stuff to the new device and mount it to SATA.
Note: Without partman you have no access to this drive!
Edit: Search gptst in “Andrews” stuff and read the readme. This tool you need to format the drive for partman.

Wow, way kool. I thought we were still at 128GB max.

256GB is the HForm limit, I’m not sure how many 256GB partitions partman on ARMX6 can handle. For Titanium 2TB HDD with 4kn sectorsize (very rare) are usable complete. But there is not an official formatter available.

Yes but why?

I wanted to replace the SSD with a disc drive, because my experience with the SSD has put me off them, at least on RISC OS.

This thread will explain why I feel this way: https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/16008

The smallest SATA disc I could buy was 500GB. The current usage is about 40GB, so formatting it down to 256GB is fine.

I’ve actually fitted two of them, so I can back up one to the other. Up to now, the backup has been to the SD card, which works for the current data size, but is a less reliable type of drive.

A bonus of doing it this way is that I can swap the drive into other RISC OS hardware and take the data along. That might not be possible if it relied on partitioning and something extra to RISC OS.

I whish there was a way to format a device with the LFAU ranges available of new format, though the filename restrictions of old ADFS. I use a device for things where I need to know 100% that nothing is more than 10 character file names, and the longest directory path does not exceed 127 characters.

In other words I wish we could use the new format with the old style directory tables.

When testing to see how Manga behaved with the more restricted filesystem (officially no support pre-OS5, but given the cache directories can hit 77 items in a heartbeat, I wanted to patch in some sort of workaround so it’d at least be functional), the way I did it was to hack together a clone of RAMdisc that used the older layout, and then softload that for testing.

Surely you really don’t want to format an entire drive that way – crippling it with the legacy format? Make yourself a RAMdisc, check the stuff there, and copy it to a normal format drive when you’re happy it’s within the desired ranges.
[if I remember correctly, go into Defns and just set all the Big things to False; if you can’t build one, I can send you mine?]

Alternatively, some BASIC to read through the directory entries ought to warn you if there are files with names over ten characters or directories with more than 77 files.

Alan – for what it is worth, I would not have recommended buying two of the same drive had you asked. They are likely from the same batch, and could have similar lifespans or issues (ie. all eggs in one basket). You would have been much better served with a replacement SSD main drive and mechanical backup drive. That’s how I build every one of the (large number of) SSD based PC/RISCube systems I build.

Whilst your opinion of SSDs is as valid as the next man, I’d just comment that I’ve seen no evidence to show (decent) SSDs to be any worse than HDDs in terms of reliability, and I’d personally only use HDDs for cheap bulk backup these days.

Incidentally, if you wish to use the whole 500 GB capacity of the second drive, use !FAT32Form in the “Utilities.Caution” folder to format the disc FAT32. This will work up to at least 1TB if not 2TB. The other alternative, as Raik says, is PartMan which is present in ROM, but may be unplugged. I believe the tools to use PartMan are on the download site.

Surely you really don’t want to format an entire drive that way – crippling it with the legacy format? Make yourself a RAMdisc, check the stuff there, and copy it to a normal format drive when you’re happy it’s within the desired ranges.
[if I remember correctly, go into Defns and just set all the Big things to False; if you can’t build one, I can send you mine?]

I had not thought about using a RAM DISK, and could just take an image to survive boots then.

I already have an extra thumb drive formated old format, and it has alocation unit size of 256KB, henc the wish for the new allocation with old directory tables.

Whilst your opinion of SSDs is as valid as the next man, I’d just comment that I’ve seen no evidence to show (decent) SSDs to be any worse than HDDs in terms of reliability…

I’ll echo your sentiments, Andrew. Back in 2011(ish) you fitted a 120 GB OCZ SSD to the Samsung laptop you sold me. The only reason I replaced it was the limited capacity when I decided to dual-boot the Windows 7 laptop with Linux Mint. That SSD is now the primary drive in one of my (non-critical) Windows boxes where it’s never missed a beat! Not that its reliability has stopped me using Macrium Reflect to back it up.

All my machines have SSDs as the main (or only) drive with HDDs as the backup drive.

Over the last 10 years a lot of spinning HDDs I use with RISC OS are die but no SSD. Now it looks like my 2TB HDD in Ti is the next. The noises are not normal :-(
Generally if I compare the Linux shutdown noises with the RISC OS one (the hdds are the same), it suggest me that the RISC OS shutdown routine is not optimal.

SSDs to be any worse than HDDs in terms of reliability

They are very reliable. But the lack of TRIM command, for both SSD and SD cards, is really a problem with heavy writes. I end up with discs and cards so slows that even Windows believes they where dead. It was a surprise for me to see that after formatting under Windows, no problem any more. Back to life :) Really, flash disks without TRIM is not good for daily/heavy use.

I have only seen one SSD die ever. That was recently, and has me running on Thumb drives at the moment, though it is the only one I have seen die. That is not saying much YET.

Remember we used to use spinning rust for 20+ years before it would die, though it would eventually die. So we have been commonly using SSDs for only about 10 to 15 years, how long before we can say anything of reliability rates?

I was hoping to do some experiments on formatting and partitioning an SDHC card, but I see that HForm 2.76 (which, I think, is the latest one – just last October) still insists on CHS parameters. How do I persuade it to use LBA in its user interface?

@ Dave Higton

but I see that HForm 2.76 (which, I think, is the latest one – just last October) still insists on CHS parameters. How do I persuade it to use LBA in its user interface?

Yes 2.76 is the latest.

AFAIR it asks you if you want to use LBA only for ADFS disks. The SDHC will go either through the SCSIFS if you’ve plugged it in via USB dongle OR it will go via MemoryCard FS (option M for SDFS basically). In both this two cases IIRC it won’t ask you for using the LBA…

I have only seen one SSD die ever.

I only have one SSD, and it’s dying – failing to operate when booting my ARMX6. Since replacing it with a real disc, the problem has stopped occuring. Crucial 256GB if it makes any difference.