PFS3 USB Hard Drive Woes

Storm

Storm

SYS64738
AmiBayer
Joined
Jun 28, 2010
Posts
602
Country
Australia
Region
Victoria
Hi all,
I have an 80GB SATA hard drive in a USB enclosure connected to the Deneb. I can format the drive but PFSDoctor says at each check that TPD64 and direct scsi cannot get information above 4GB. I am using scsi.device 44.2 and PFS3 AIO. Is this something to do with Poseidon's usbscsi.device as everything seems to work fine in my internal 40GB IDE hard drive?
 
I can use a 320MB SeaGate USB drive with Deneb, but I use FFS. There are still some issues, but simple saves and restores work.
 
I assume driver only supports NSD. Original PFS3 (including PFSDoctor) does not support NSD. It is PF3 AIO only. (PFSDoctor needs similar update)
 
I was also getting read/write errors on the external drive from time to time. I changed back to scsi.device 43.45 and am now using the Deneb in Z3 PIO mode. Read/write errors are gone and system stability is back at a cost of 300kb transfer rate. I can live with that. PFSDoctor still puts up that warning but the partitions check out with no errors now.
 
Toni.Wilen said:
I assume driver only supports NSD. Original PFS3 (including PFSDoctor) does not support NSD. It is PF3 AIO only. (PFSDoctor needs similar update)
Click to expand...

I'm resurrecting this thread since I have a similar problem with PFSDoctor here. Am testing the SD interface on the Vampire 2 using sagasd.device, but when I try to run PFSDoctor on a large partition, it cannot check it since it complains that it can't read above the 4GB barrier. Since the partition is mounted and usable, I assume that PFS3-AIO is able to access the entire partition without problems? I understand that it supposedly checks whether it can read the start and end of the partition before mounting it to ensure it won't write any wrapped data.

But if that is the case, is the problem then just with PFSDoctor and not sagasd.device? If PFSDoctor is the problem, is there any other tool which is able to check the integrity of a PFS3 partition?
 
Experimental PFS3 that supports larger file and partition sizes also includes pfs3doctor with >4G support. Of course it may not be stable but at least CHECK mode should be safe (safe as in can't corrupt the filesystem). I'll attach/upload it later..
 
Thanks. I had some issues with PFS3 reporting write errors with sagasd.device, but if I click retry it seems to go through eventually without problems as I have not discovered any read errors or corrupt archives when reading back the files that reported the write errors. But it would be nice to be able to check the integrity of the volume.
 
Thanks, I tried it out and it seemed to run fine and looked like it could not find any problems. Not completely sure how to decode the output from it but I guess it should have said error somewhere if it found anything?
 
mfilos said:
What sagasd.device driver are you using man?
Click to expand...

The latest one, 0.9c from May 16th.

I did found out that the problems seem to go away if I manually use some more standard geometries instead of the ones HDToolBox detects. I get occational write errors when I use 6 heads and 256 blocks/track which is what is autodetected, but if I manually set 16 heads and 63 blocks/track instead and correct the other values accordingly, then it seems to work much better. Perhaps some bug in PFS3?
 
Eh.. Jumping to conclusions a bit too soon? Use exact same geometry with some other controller. If it works, you know whats wrong.
 
Well, it was working for a while and seemed to fix the issue, but it may just have been random. After clearing the drive and reconfiguring the drive to 16/63 geometry with new partitions, I managed to get the write error to appear after writing to it for about an hour. Whether it took so long by chance is hard to say without more tests. I have never seen this issue when using scsi.device though (even with the Apollo core), so it may still be an issue/incompatibility with sagasd.device.
 
What MicroSD are you using btw?
I have 2 atm and both seem to work fine:
- Transcend Class4 16GB works really nice (no errors so far) and under speed0.
- Sandisk Class10 16GB works really nice (no errors so far) but only under speed1. With old driver which didn't autosense speed values, under speed1 I was ok, and under speed0 I got system freezes.
 
Using a 32GB Sandisk Class10. Don't know what you mean with speed1 and speed0.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom