On Mon, Feb 04, 2002 at 11:40:25AM -0000, P Witte wrote: > Richard Zidlicky writes: > > > > 6) Where can I find documentation or information on the QWA partion > > > table(s)? > > > > information about physical QWA fs layout is badly scattered around, > > uqlx/docs/qxlwin.html describes the basic idea of it. If you need > > more detailed knowledge just ask. > > Of course the sources of atari-fdisk, qxl_fschk and uqlx are available. > > > > *NOTE* QWA fs layout is not identical on QXL/QPC/Q40. > > > > The partition tables used by SMSQ and Linux-Q40 are Atari-ST like > > with XGM extension, and a few quirks in SMSQ. The format is pretty > > well described in the README that comes with atari-fdisk sources. > > The atari-fdisk readme gives a good picture of the partition table format. > However, it does not mention QWA specifically. I seem to remember that if > fdisk is used to partition the drive initially only qxltools can format it, > ie not Smsq itself (though it can of course use them). What exactly are the > differences?
This restriction should no longer be true if you have a recent enough copy of atari-fdisk. The difference that caused most problems was that SMSQ expects a special magic number in the first word of block 0, otherwise it assumes the harddisk unpartitioned. Atari partition format doesn't know such a magic number, the first word of the sector is booter code (if any) which happens to be often that magic.. There is still the restriction that SMSQ partitions copied from QXL, QPC or formatted with qxltools need special treatment before SMSQ can use them. > Does Smsq/eQ60 support XGM partitions and/or the ICD > partitioning scheme? XGM if anything, there is definitely some code in SMSQ to parse it. Iirc several people reported it didn't work to place QWA filesystems on XGM partitions. Otoh SMSQ will hapilly ignore Linux partitions placed on XGM partitions so this is not such a big problem. I will send you a few pieces of disassembled SMSQ/mkpart code per pm. Bye Richard
