Anders Johansson (andjoh@rydsbo.net) wrote something I wish to comment : (news:<200507120013.41391.andjoh@rydsbo.net> posted on 11-juil-05 23:13:41)

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I would like to be able to read Amiga formatted floppies (and later, hard disk too), but I think the FFS filesystem is no more included in the Suse 9.3 Pro distribution (it used to be).

It looks like it is (although I have no way of testing it). Did you try running "modprobe affs"?

Something I forgot is that Amiga floppies are 880/1760K formatted instead of the common 720/1440K. I'm not even sure my floppy drive is capable of reading those disks. modprobe ? (It return a "command unknown")

From what I remember from the 9.3 installation, the FFS (FastFileSystem) was not available as an option to format partitions.

AmigaPhil, world citizen. /No MS-HTML mail please/ PGP key: 0x9C07F6C1 -----BEGIN NSA TEASER----- The following garbage may or may not contain crypted message. At least you now know I'm an advocate for the respect of privacy. GEUy0FzMVOjvWjzVEpc2HOBHdS5atH6dtOIT5aFPfyV6IcvytkRDlHWtzVnDOLapDyVRoyOz HqJkpYMpCJtIVl3J1yvFAaAKUEDbJRBUxpRabtpyIv0WV55UVMWvtlpnvGxSMMRtAIkSWFOz ahpSTtOayOl5HnKVIHzExqpSHFMzOlFSIHAyMtEyltrDVIqvqyIOOtL1FxFqFVLyDnEIEOVR ulHBJAbONRVvPOMMxFvGt3== -----END NSA TEASER----- If all else fails, you must still be using Windows.

Patrick Shanahan (ptilopteri@gmail.com) wrote something I wish to comment : (news:<20050711230811.GC3381@wahoo.no-ip.org> posted on 12-juil-05 00:08:11)

* AmigaPhil@ping.be [07-11-05 18:01]: ...

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modprobe ? (It return a "command unknown")

Guess you need to familiarize yourself with the linux filesystem. "modprobe" exists at /sbin/modprobe (on my box) which is not in your $PATH. You must present the file's path for the system to find it, ie: /sbin/modprobe

Ah thanks. /sbin/modprobe affs now return "Error inserting affs ... Operation not permitted". But at least I now know that the Amiga FFS module exists. I'll try to mout a FFS partition later... AmigaPhil, world citizen. /No MS-HTML mail please/ PGP key: 0x9C07F6C1 -----BEGIN PRIVACY PROTECTOR----- The following garbage may or may not contain crypted message. At least you now know I'm an advocate for the respect of privacy. DbOPpSEGVyAyLVIqRzpVWYWzIvGHcoE1SFHID2zaEvjHROAHqSlOxLEpvMIVJlFOtzyWVJlC vc2xvtSyaFthAKKtvRpOITn5qYOdpFFyAtMlnUkALHzvVlrnSjJOtpanlOzqMtFMI5WpVv5y BRIaMJTzEFDIVDpCF5UDd0DFIFzVIHVOxOMMvOqVtRyUybIt5BtHJO3EH56VHtDzyOfMRRtq I1xMHVOlVyRVEEHIPUAuE30vNMtG== -----END PRIVACY PROTECTOR----- IfYouCanReadThisYourSpecksAreBetterThanMine

On Tuesday 12 July 2005 01:56, Patrick Shanahan wrote:

Also, existence of the module will not allow you to mount an AFFS/FFS partition

Actually it should, if everything works as it should. I only suggested to manually modprobe the module to see if there was something preventing it from loading. Normally it should load automatically when you mount a partition of that type

Something I forgot is that Amiga floppies are 880/1760K formatted instead of the common 720/1440K. I'm not even sure my floppy drive is capable of reading those disks.

modprobe ? (It return a "command unknown")

You have to be root to run modprobe. Brana

On Monday 11 July 2005 19:58, AmigaPhil@ping.be wrote: [snip]

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I would like to be able to read Amiga formatted floppies (and later, hard disk too), but I think the FFS filesystem is no more included in the Suse 9.3 Pro distribution (it used to be). [snip] Something I forgot is that Amiga floppies are 880/1760K formatted instead of the common 720/1440K. I'm not even sure my floppy drive is capable of reading those disks. [snip]

Yes, I think it is unlikely that you'll be able to read native Amiga floppy disks in a standard PC drive. From what I recall, the "controller" for the floppy drive was the Amiga custom hardware and the system used DMA to read/write a full track of raw data in one rotation. This made the Amiga very flexible, allowing it to vary the number and size of sectors. So, the normal Amiga format has a different number of sectors from what a typical PC floppy controller understands. (Also, there were device drivers/filesystems written for the Amiga that allowed it to use a format and filesystem compatible with MS-DOS/Atari ST disks. If you happened to save files like that, then you should be able to read them in linux.) There is (was?) a programmable hardware controller called CatWeasel with linux drivers that let you read and write a number of different 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 floppy disk formats including Amiga. You should be able to read Amiga hard drive partitions though.

On Tue, 12 Jul 2005, Carlos E. R. wrote:-

The Monday 2005-07-11 at 21:08 -0400, Synthetic Cartoonz wrote:

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So, the normal Amiga format has a different number of sectors from what a typical PC floppy controller understands. (Also, there were device

It is possible to modify the number of sectors and many other things on a PC floppy dirve as well. I remember one scheme for increasing capacity modifying the size of the sector leader or sync sections, getting nearly 2 megs.

I used to use a similar system to get 1600KB[0], or higher, on a single floppy. The highest I ever achieved was about 1804KB[1][2] but that was only usable on one system, nor was it terribly reliable for longer term storage, so I stopped using that format.

If I remember correctly, the drive does almost nothing, it is controlled directly by the software of the OS. It is not intelligent: that's why many programs froze while saving to floppy in dos.

The drive doesn't do very much at all apart from read from the disc and send the data to the disc controller, and write the data it receives from the disc controller onto the disc. [0] 80 tracks, 20 sectors, 2 sides. [1] 84 tracks, 22 sectors, 2 sides. Because the sector sync, header and other bits that marked out the sectors was reduced to the minimum, or even below minimum, specs the sectors were interleaved[3] which gave the controller a chance to spot the end-of-data/end-of-sector markers before it started looking for the next start-of-sector header. All this slowed down data transfers but, due to the processing delays making the controller miss the markers, it did increase reliability a touch. [2] using fdformat /dev/fd0u1760 formats a disc using 80 tracks, 22 sectors and 2 sides, resulting in 1760KB. [3] sectors were laid out in the following order: 1,12,2,13,3,14,4,15,5,16,6,17,7,18,8,19,9,20,10,21,11,22 Regards, David Bolt -- Member of Team Acorn checking nodes at 63 Mnodes/s: http://www.distributed.net/ AMD 1800 1Gb WinXP/SuSE 9.3 | AMD 2400 160Mb SuSE 8.1 | AMD 2400 256Mb SuSE 9.0 AMD 1300 512Mb SuSE 9.0 | Falcon 14Mb TOS 4.02 | STE 4Mb TOS 1.62 RPC600 129Mb RISCOS 3.6 | A3010 4Mb RISCOS 3.11 | A4000 4Mb RISCOS 3.11