SDActive released

I’ve just put up SDActive on my web site You may find this useful if you populate a micro SD card with files yourself; all the SD cards I’ve bought recently are correctly FAT formatted, but won’t boot unless the first partition is marked as Active. My app makes it dead easy to mark it as either Active or Inactive (it tells you what the current state is, and allows you to change it if you wish). It also textifies the four partition table entries.

Note: this first version requires that the card be in a card reader/writer – it will NOT work on the card in the built in interface. (I hope to release a later version that will.) On the plus side, it will work with anything that sees card reader/writers via SCSIFS, which means it will work on BeagleBoard, BeagleBoard xM and Iyonix.

It reads a USB hard drive and a CF card, via an adaptor, quite happily on my iyonix.

Is the program potentially the start of an Fdisk for RISC OS?

Is the program potentially the start of an Fdisk for RISC OS?

I guess it could be. Partitioning is dead easy if restricted to primary partitions.

What did you have in mind?

A utility that, on a filecore disk, would read the location of the filecore area.

And then allow the creation of a DOS style partition table, with the first entry having the area used by ADFS.

The new partition would have a definable identifier, perhaps using Theo’s suggestion of AD (or AC), as a default.

(It would also be nice if it could also create other primary partitions, but obviously this could be done with existing tools on other systems.)

The aim would be to allow someone to use SCSIform using less than the full capacity.

The utitlty would then retro fit the partition information.

Then the user could use standard tools on a PC to partition and format the rest of the drive.

The objective being to share a big drive between RISC OS and another system, (NTFS etc.)

Obviously another objective is to test whether such a configuration is stable,for the implications to future partitioning support. (e.g. might RISC OS wipe out the partition table if the drive gets full? Do any existing RISC OS versions object to the partition table being there? Do any other operating systems mess it up?)

(Hope you enjoy Texas.)

Ah, dual-partition removable drives. Yes, we already did all that when we were looking at the USB sticks for the London show.

We wanted to have just one stick with both Filecore and FAT partitions, so it would dual-serve as a (say) 256MB boot drive for RISC OS native platforms as well as a 256MB FAT partition with the emulator stuff on. Unfortunately, most operating systems get very annoyed when there are multiple partitions on removable drives – only Linux behaved itself – and RISC OS doesn’t support the concept either. So even though we might have fooled RISC OS into working by putting the Filecore partition in as the first partition on the drive, other operating systems refused to see the FAT partition.

Fixing partition support in RISC OS properly is of course a longer term goal, but in the mean time we did consider adding in some kind of bodge to make it search for a Filecore partition in the second partition of a removable drive, but then you’d need a brand new ROM to use the USB “boot stick” which defeats the whole plug-and-play idea we had in mind. Arguably, anyone using the Filecore stick that hadn’t already got a working boot solution would be setting up a new machine and thus be using a new ROM anyway, but in the end time pressures and the uncertainties around behaviour on all platforms meant that we followed the path of least resistance – separate Filecore and FAT format sticks with just one partition on each.

I tried it by using scsiform and parted. (Not marking the filecore part in the table) And it seemed to work fine (XP and linux), I tried various formats for the second partition. The only issue I noticed was that FAT32FS unmounted the Filecore partition when I used FAT as the 2nd one. (It was a USB hard drive, I used.)

I didn’t keep the drive like this since the FC area had no partition entry.

Perhaps I should revise the request to allow the retrofitted filecore partition to be placed in any of the four slots. That might solve the problem you observed.

In your tests did you give the FC partition an entry and a type, or did you just leave empty space?

I’ve updated my web site with version 0.02 of SDActive, which works on the card in the built in card reader/writer as well as an external one.