SmartFileSystem 1.274

Does the current 'limitation' in partition width still apply? I have 2 1TB HDDs and 20 or so partitions...

The limit for 'SFS\2' partitons is 1 TB.

Or even more if you don't use 512 bytes/block, for example with 32 KB/block partitions of up to 64 TB should be possible. But I didn't test if that actually works

But even if it works you shouldn't create such large partitions, SFSDDefrag and when 'SFS\2' support is added tools like SFSCheck, PartitionWizard, etc. need several 100 MB RAM to work on a 1 TB partition ...

Creating or restoring a backup of a 1 TB partition very likely takes a few days, even nearly one day if you have identical partitions on 2 HDs and use something like diskcopy for a mirror backup/restore instead of copying the individual files.

tonyw wrote:
@TMTisFree

Be wary of your 2 GB RAM. Although it may seem to be fault-free, I would be very surprised if it did not have errors that are not detected in normal use, but only show up with large files in RAM.

So you might find that files that are copied into RAM and back to disk end up with corruptions.

Yes, I know that your RAM has "never shown a problem" etc, etc, but I don't believe that there are any A1s that work faultlessly with 2 DIMMs in place. I can always be proved wrong, of course, and PowerAmiga will argue, but don't trust it.

Mlehto wrote:
@TMTisFree

I think, he means, that a1 chipset is unable to handle two sticks correctly.

so you can test in with join couple of big files together and then copy it to ram and again to disk. To be sure make that couple of times (allways delete earlier copy from ram) and then check result to compare original to copied with md5 sum.

I'm intrested in about results allso.

An other pb: I have a HDD that is not recognized anymore in either system I tested it (A1/UBoot, PC/BIOS). It contains 2 old SFS/2 partitions. I would like to recover the data by a specialized firm. Is it possible to recover the data? If yes, on which form?

Ferry wrote:
@TMTisFree

Perhaps because English is not my mother tongue, I cannot see any "tone" in his posting towards you, he's only advicing against taking any pair of mem sticks (i.e., used in pairs in an A1) as reliable without heavy testings first.

It's not that the sticks are faulty, so there's no real need to check them on another machine -unless you really suspect of a hard failure-, but that the A1 is quite unreliable when using them in pairs, it's related to timing, IIRC.

I myself am using 2 x 512MB sticks, and they have not passed memtester fully, at some stage it reports some fault, so better take tonyw and mlehto advice for good and check sticks in place, copying large files to ram: and checking their integrity with md5sum against original files, as I did.

Saluditos,

Ferr?n.

As I said above, I know there are pb with two sticks inserted because memtester reports faults, but no error with either module alone. But I would like to fully test the modules with a bootable CD on a PC, but the one I currently work on has only DDR slots. Will check the Win98 PCs of my sons tomorrow.

tonyw wrote:
@TMTisFree

Sorry if I seemed to be criticising you.

I was trying to warn you that there may be errors that you can't detect when two sticks are used. Those errors (if they occur) might cause file corruptions that could spoil your data on disk without your knowing about it.

I don't know of any memory test process that we can rely on.

BTW, what sort of 1GB DIMMs do you have?

joerg wrote:
It depends on what is defect, if it's an electronic or mechanical defect they usually just take the discs from the non-working HD and build them into another, identical HD with working electronics and mechanics. If that's not possible, either because they can't get an identical HD, often even the firmware version has to be the same, or because the discs have errors due to head crashes, etc. the only thing they can do with file systems they don't know is to copy as much of the data they can recover to another HD, either the sectors directly or they put the data from the broken HD in one file on a NTFS, ext2fs, or whatever common file system with large file support you want, partition.

If the discs themself had too serious errors, they can't recover all data and therefore using SmartFileSystem2 itself doesn't work to access the data I could build a special SmartFileSystem2 version of SFSSalv or PartitionWizard for you.

If they know the file system(s) which was/were used on the broken HD you get a new HD with the same partitions and individual files instead, but even if there are companies which offer such a service for custom file systems as well the fee would be huge, not "just" the usual hundreds or thousends US$ (depending on the size of the HD), especially for a file system they'll never have to deal with again and for which they would have to write special recovery software only for a single HD.