File Allocation Table Keeps Getting Corrupted

[chromium]

Not sure why this is happening.

I created a VHD containing all of the eXoDOS v5 games that I converted using eXoConverter 0.9.2-beta.

All seems fine at first, then after testing a few games it suddenly seems to take ages to start a game and then shortly after that my E:\Games folder become inaccessible. When I try to do a dir inside I get "File allocation table bad, drive E"

This isn't anything to do with not unmounting the VHD because it is literally happening on the first time I boot up with the new VHD after I create it.

It's happened a couple of times now. I have a 121 GB FAT32 partition, so I thought that should be ok.

What's the best way to create a clean VHD? I believe it needs a 10MB FAT16 partition as the first partition. At least that's what the Top 300 image has.

[Malor]

One thought that comes to mind: is the image on an SD card? They're famously unreliable, especially cheap ones. Check the host Linux dmesg to see if the kernel is complaining about I/O errors of any kind.

[chromium]

One thought that comes to mind: is the image on an SD card? They're famously unreliable, especially cheap ones. Check the host Linux dmesg to see if the kernel is complaining about I/O errors of any kind.

It's on a USB HDD. I just created another VHD and loaded 120 GB of games onto it and the very first boot I'm getting "Sector not found" when doing a dir on E:\Games lol

If I mount the .vhd on my PC I can read it fine

Not sure what is going on tbh

[lister_of_smeg]

One thought that comes to mind: is the image on an SD card? They're famously unreliable, especially cheap ones. Check the host Linux dmesg to see if the kernel is complaining about I/O errors of any kind.

It's on a USB HDD. I just created another VHD and loaded 120 GB of games onto it and the very first boot I'm getting "Sector not found" when doing a dir on E:\Games lol

If I mount the .vhd on my PC I can read it fine

Not sure what is going on tbh

FAT32 has a file size limitation of 4GB, so you should use exFAT if you're working with VHDs that are larger than that.

EDIT: Sorry, I now realize you mean the filesystem inside the VHD.

[Malor]

Could you be using the wrong DOS kernel? Maybe? Do you still get corruption when you boot from the Win98 DOS image in the Top300, and use that to play the games you've loaded on your custom games image?

edit: and just in case, have you tried wiping and re-downloading all the ROM files? They've changed numerous times over the last couple months.

second edit: oh, also, did you update the binaries related to the shared folder? That was reworked, so if you're loading the old DOS misterfs program, all kinds of weird crap could happen. There are several binaries, related to sound and CD images and such, and you should probably copy them all in fresh, but misterfs.exe is the critical one. And you can't easily use the shared directory for that one, since misterfs.exe is what makes it work, and you can't run the old version to let you copy in the new one. It's probably easiest to mount the drive image as a loopback under Linux and copy it in that way. If you're building custom images, I assume you probably already know how.

[chromium]

Could you be using the wrong DOS kernel? Maybe? Do you still get corruption when you boot from the Win98 DOS image in the Top300, and use that to play the games you've loaded on your custom games image?

edit: and just in case, have you tried wiping and re-downloading all the ROM files? They've changed numerous times over the last couple months.

second edit: oh, also, did you update the binaries related to the shared folder? That was reworked, so if you're loading the old DOS misterfs program, all kinds of weird crap could happen. There are several binaries, related to sound and CD images and such, and you should probably copy them all in fresh, but misterfs.exe is the critical one. And you can't easily use the shared directory for that one, since misterfs.exe is what makes it work, and you can't run the old version to let you copy in the new one. It's probably easiest to mount the drive image as a loopback under Linux and copy it in that way. If you're building custom images, I assume you probably already know how.

I'm using the win98 dos image as my boot drive. I just did a whole new 121 GB secondary drive again and everything was fine. I was testing out games and after successfully loading a few: "File allocation table bad, drive E"

I'm not using any shared folder stuff, I've been creating the VHD and loading it up on my Windows PC. I'm basically using the Top 300 image as a base then copying my games, files and .IDX files that I created using exodos converter. Where do I get these new binaries from?

I have the latest boot roms, I've actually only had my MiSTer for a week or so.

What would be the cleanest way to create a new VHD?

[akeley]

viewtopic.php?t=4522

[chromium]

viewtopic.php?t=4522

I did have a look at that thread earlier. I was basing my image on the top 300 because I wanted to use TDL. I actually created a full exodos image based on the shareware one and MyMenu choked on 7200 games. It was trying to load them all into the menu and ran out of memory after around 6000

I'm wondering if the version of TDL I'm using is corrupting the drive somehow. I dunno, it's really weird. I don't know if it's the way I'm creating the image that is the issue. I tried a couple of ways.

I've tried expanding the existing top 300 with diskpart then increasing the partition size in AMOEI Partition Assistant. This seems to work, but I still eventually get corruption.

I also tried creating a new VHD, partitioning it with a 10MB FAT partition, then a 121GB FAT32 partition all in diskpart. I had to format the large FAT32 partition in another tool because DISKPART won't do over 32GB. I formatted with 16KB cluster size, just like the top 300 image. Everything about it seemed the same as the top 300 image, but in ao486 when I did a dir of the games folder I got a general failure. The folder ran fine when the image was mounted on my Windows PC though.

[flynnsbit]

It can't be over 134GB raw or it will corrupt. Back it off to like 119GB formatted and see if it does the same thing.

[chromium]

It can't be over 134GB raw or it will corrupt. Back it off to like 119GB formatted and see if it does the same thing.

I thought it might be something like that. I originally had a 128GB partition and when that got corrupted I dropped it down.

Total size of the VHD is 121GB. There's a 10MB STUB partition and then a 121GB partition. So that's no good? I'll try 119GB. It'll be a tight squeeze getting everything on there. I think I had like 2.5GB free and there's still a few games that didn't convert properly.

[flynnsbit]

That seems okay. You only need the 10MB STUB if you are going to do the ASSIGN drive trick that I do in the Top 300 to get the D: drive to be a CD drive while having the C and E for boot and data. if you don't plan to do that and don't care what drive letter is the CD drive then you dont need that.

ExoDOS expects the D: drive to be D:.

You could also take your big 121GB and have dos and all the games on it as your single disk drive, the have CD on D:. It would simplify that whole hack with the STUB disk. Hopefully that makes sense.

[chromium]

That seems okay. You only need the 10MB STUB if you are going to do the ASSIGN drive trick that I do in the Top 300 to get the D: drive to be a CD drive while having the C and E for boot and data. if you don't plan to do that and don't care what drive letter is the CD drive then you dont need that.

ExoDOS expects the D: drive to be D:.

You could also take your big 121GB and have dos and all the games on it as your single disk drive, the have CD on D:. It would simplify that whole hack with the STUB disk. Hopefully that makes sense.

Yeah I guessed that the stub was to make room for the CD drive for eXoDOS.

I was thinking of trying a single drive. Maybe I'll do that next. I just wish I could solve this FAT corruption issue

Thanks!

[flynnsbit]

That seems okay. You only need the 10MB STUB if you are going to do the ASSIGN drive trick that I do in the Top 300 to get the D: drive to be a CD drive while having the C and E for boot and data. if you don't plan to do that and don't care what drive letter is the CD drive then you dont need that.

ExoDOS expects the D: drive to be D:.

You could also take your big 121GB and have dos and all the games on it as your single disk drive, the have CD on D:. It would simplify that whole hack with the STUB disk. Hopefully that makes sense.

Yeah I guessed that the stub was to make room for the CD drive for eXoDOS.

I was thinking of trying a single drive. Maybe I'll do that next. I just wish I could solve this FAT corruption issue

Thanks!

I for sure corrupted a few VHDs when I was building the 7200 pack. Here is where I ended up on the size of mine:137438953984 raw

[chromium]

I for sure corrupted a few VHDs when I was building the 7200 pack. Here is where I ended up on the size of mine:137438953984 raw

Would you mind telling me the steps you used to create, partition and format the VHD when creating the 7200 game image? Because yeah, my total VHD file size is only 121GB and it still gets corrupted

[flynnsbit]

I for sure corrupted a few VHDs when I was building the 7200 pack. Here is where I ended up on the size of mine:137438953984 raw

Would you mind telling me the steps you used to create, partition and format the VHD when creating the 7200 game image? Because yeah, my total VHD file size is only 121GB and it still gets corrupted

It's been two years but I think I did it the way I did it in that other thread. Create the VHD in Windows 10 (Just using Disk Management). Move it over to the mister and mount it as the IDE 0-1 drive, mount the IDE 0-0 with the boot vhd from windows 98. Fdisk that partition, format the partition from dos (takes forever, you can move it over to windows and do it using 86Box/PCem if you prefer)

Mount on windows, do the deed with ExoDOSConverter and or whatever you want on the vhd and copy everything there. Unmount, and then back over to the mister and mount and it should be good to go.

[chromium]

It's been two years but I think I did it the way I did it in that other thread. Create the VHD in Windows 10 (Just using Disk Management). Move it over to the mister and mount it as the IDE 0-1 drive, mount the IDE 0-0 with the boot vhd from windows 98. Fdisk that partition, format the partition from dos (takes forever, you can move it over to windows and do it using 86Box/PCem if you prefer)

Mount on windows, do the deed with ExoDOSConverter and or whatever you want on the vhd and copy everything there. Unmount, and then back over to the mister and mount and it should be good to go.

Great, thanks. I was doing the formatting on Windows, maybe that's why it didn't work.

The other method expanding the partition with AOMEI was the method giving me corruption. I'll creating the partitions and formatting in DOS.

[chromium]

So I booted from a Windows 98 floppy. Partitioned with FDISK, and formatted with FORMAT C: /S
All seemed good, but then when I went to copy the eXoDOS collection I ran out of space because it used a cluster size of 32KB. 105GB used 120GB of space with a 32KB cluster size.
I need 16KB for it to fit, but I can't see any way to override the size from the old DOS format command.
So I guess I need to make the VHD bigger, but make sure I don't exceed the 134GB limit

Fun times!

Edit: So I've created a new VHD, file size is exactly 137,438,953,984 Bytes, so hopefully it's good. That should be big enough to fit the entire collection when formatted with a 32KB cluster size

[chromium]

It's been two years but I think I did it the way I did it in that other thread. Create the VHD in Windows 10 (Just using Disk Management). Move it over to the mister and mount it as the IDE 0-1 drive, mount the IDE 0-0 with the boot vhd from windows 98. Fdisk that partition, format the partition from dos (takes forever, you can move it over to windows and do it using 86Box/PCem if you prefer)

Mount on windows, do the deed with ExoDOSConverter and or whatever you want on the vhd and copy everything there. Unmount, and then back over to the mister and mount and it should be good to go.

So I made the largest size VHD (137,438,953,984 Bytes) and I still can't fit eXoDOSv5 on there with 32KB clusters and the DOS format command doesn't allow me to override cluster size..

I tried formatting in guiformat but it keeps complaining that the disk is in use, even the second after I mount it.
Also if I did it that way I wouldn't have a system on there. I guess I could try using the sys: command from a bootable disk, but yeah, can't even format it and I'm not sure how reliable it would be if I don't format it from inside DOS.

I guess I'm going to have to trim some games

Edit: It looks like some of the games didn't convert properly, so the CD images are in the VHD, moving those out should do the trick!

[chromium]

Partitioning and formatting all in DOS is the way to go. I've been testing out games for a couple of hours and haven't managed to corrupt the partition yet

Thanks for all the responses.