MiSTer FPGA Forum

I made a 1 gig HDF and I was wondering if there is any reason on Minimig not to have the boot/Workbench partition take up the whole disk? In other words is there any reason I would really want a Work and Games partition? It's all on an SSD on a NAS.

thisisamigaspeaking wrote: ↑Sun Jul 17, 2022 10:32 pm I made a 1 gig HDF and I was wondering if there is any reason on Minimig not to have the boot/Workbench partition take up the whole disk? In other words is there any reason I would really want a Work and Games partition? It's all on an SSD on a NAS.

It's just the traditional way Amigas were commonly setup...

I think the reasoning is probably is so that you could have (a smaller) SYS: formatted with FFS and then your larger partitions could use PFS.

If you've ever waited for large FFS partition to validate, then I think you'd understand...

Also, sometimes the size of a boot partition can be limited by scsi.device bugs depending on Kickstart version.

Hope that helps.

bbond007 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 18, 2022 10:22 pm I think the reasoning is probably is so that you could have (a smaller) SYS: formatted with FFS and then your larger partitions could use PFS.

AmigaOS is sophisticated enough to boot from a custom file system (a pretty cool and unique feature for an OS), so you can use PFS for everything — which is what we do in MegaAGS.

The reason to have a separate partition was mostly for convenience around upgrading or similar as far as I remember — if you wanted to blow away your existing OS but still keep your games and media, that was pretty easy. Also, HDs were expensive, and you were more likely to have two cheaper drives than one massive drive. Or you could do funky stuff like using a 1GB Jaz (or even 100MB Zip) drive for media/games, and use the HD for the system itself, since it was faster.

If you've ever waited for large FFS partition to validate, then I think you'd understand...

Yeah, definitely don’t use FFS if you can avoid it. PFS is the way.

I never ever had to reinstall Amiga OS. One idea is to just add a 'work' folder and create a work: assign for it.

bbond007 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 18, 2022 10:22 pm

thisisamigaspeaking wrote: ↑Sun Jul 17, 2022 10:32 pm I made a 1 gig HDF and I was wondering if there is any reason on Minimig not to have the boot/Workbench partition take up the whole disk? In other words is there any reason I would really want a Work and Games partition? It's all on an SSD on a NAS.

It's just the traditional way Amigas were commonly setup...

I think the reasoning is probably is so that you could have (a smaller) SYS: formatted with FFS and then your larger partitions could use PFS.

If you've ever waited for large FFS partition to validate, then I think you'd understand...

Hope that helps.

Hmm, it's been quite a long time since I had real Amigas, don't remember about validation, or maybe vaguely remember it. Had hard disks in an A2000/030 and A1200.

Maybe I messed up then and now would be a good time to fix it before I put anything else on it. I saw the default 8MB (?) Workbench partition and thought that seemed way too small so I made a 1GB partition. How long are we talking to validate a 1GB partition on MiSTer?

limi wrote: ↑Mon Jul 18, 2022 10:31 pm
AmigaOS is sophisticated enough to boot from a custom file system (a pretty cool and unique feature for an OS), so you can use PFS for everything — which is what we do in MegaAGS.

I think on my real A1200 with 3.1 ROM with FastATA I am limited by on the SYS: drive because the FastATA driver needed to load from a smaller partition.

So, I guess now I do it simply out of tradition

thisisamigaspeaking wrote: ↑Mon Jul 18, 2022 10:39 pm Maybe I messed up then and now would be a good time to fix it before I put anything else on it. I saw the default 8MB (?) Workbench partition and thought that seemed way too small so I made a 1GB partition. How long are we talking to validate a 1GB partition on MiSTer?

It takes a very long time. Remember, it still operates at about 2MB/s transfer speeds. If you reset the Amiga during a write operation, it has to validate the disk, and you may even corrupt the disk if you’re unlucky. Definitely use PFS.

It's pretty common to have multiple images for different OS revisions, so keeping the OS images small, and installing games and apps onto a dedicated apps image has been the typical way to deal with that. On WinUAE, for instance, I have images for OS 1.3 and 3.1, both pretty small, and then a large games volume. This lets me easily change between Amiga models while keeping the games library available.

On Minimig, I don't really do that. Instead, I just use the boatload of work that the MegaAGS team put into making everything run under Workbench 3.1.

thisisamigaspeaking wrote: ↑Mon Jul 18, 2022 10:39 pm Maybe I messed up then and now would be a good time to fix it before I put anything else on it. I saw the default 8MB (?) Workbench partition and thought that seemed way too small so I made a 1GB partition. How long are we talking to validate a 1GB partition on MiSTer?

For system, I'd think in 100s of MB... 8MB is to small and 1GB is probably overkill and would take a long time to validate.

I actually like to run Amiga applications and not just games, so I'm sure I have a lot more libraries, tools and such installed than the typical gamer needs.

Malor wrote: ↑Tue Jul 19, 2022 12:05 am It's pretty common to have multiple images for different OS revisions, so keeping the OS images small, and installing games and apps onto a dedicated apps image has been the typical way to deal with that.

Yeah, and the early boot menu (when you press both mouse buttons on boot) makes a very nice OS picker... AmigaOS really nice features like boot menu, storing custom filesystem drivers the way it does, and datatypes are some of my favorites.

Yeah, the driver loader for filesystems is brilliant. For those not in the know, partitions have an area at the beginning where custom code can be loaded to drive the attached filesystem. So you can boot from any filesystem you want, even new ones that aren't in the original ROM. Current operating systems aren't that flexible. (although just gratuitously running driver code upon scanning a partition would probably be a horrible security risk.)

However, actually configuring this is a right pain in the posterior. Partitioning a disk on the Amiga and loading a custom filesystem is one of the most gratuitously tedious processes I've ever seen. You have to manually type in the partition code in hex, even though it's usually plaintext. PFS, for instance, I think uses "PFS3" as its filesystem identifier, but you have to manually enter that as something vaguely like \x50\x46\x53\x33 ... that's probably not the actual syntax, but it's roughly comparable. And you have to do that on every damn partition, this multi-step, error-prone process, where you enter that plus other operational parameters the filesystem needs. It's very painful. It makes oldschool Linux look downright friendly.

If only Commodore had invested money back into Amiga development, rough edges like that would have been smoothed over.

Fortunately, the MegaAGS people have gone through all that pain, so you don't have to.