Richard Zidlicky writes: > > 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
Im using atafdisk0.7.1 - the most recent one I could find. > 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. On a QXL.WIN file the header always starts at sector 0, whereas on QWA this is always the location of the primary partition table, so unless theres a difference in the FAT itself - and I dont think so, because both headers are labled QLWA - its only a matter of the locating the header you want and then youre basically looking at a QXL.WIN. Or are there other differences? > > 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. That would imply that you can only have up to 3 QL partitions per disk if you have 1 or more Linux/other partitions, and max 4 QL partitions per disk if they are the only ones? A bit skimpy for a 10 Gig drive.. > I will send you a few pieces of disassembled SMSQ/mkpart code > per pm. Recieved with thanks. No one has sent any sectors for me to look at yet, so if you all thought I was going to be swamped by everyone else, you are being just a little too considerate ;) Per
