On Tue, Feb 05, 2002 at 08:51:36AM -0000, P Witte wrote: > 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.
you need one hacked by me, emailing it right now. > > 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? **there are differences** What is worse, SMSQ will seemingly work for a while with such a different QXL.WIN file and silently corrupt anything on the disk !!!!!! > > > 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.. appears so. You can try the SMSQ XGM parsing, perhaps it works for you, perhaps noone tried it with recent enough SMSQ/atari-fdisk/qxltool combination. > 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 ;) Some people have (like me) used couple of different attempts with mkpart, atari-fdisk,qxltool, format to get something useable so we have no reliable data for you. You can see the known differences much better by looking at the atari-fdisk sources I've sent you. Bye Richard
