!HForm to create a partition table and entry.

I just got my Pi and tried Chris Hall’s distro. I also tried creating a partition table entry for the ADFS section (as the 4th entry). This showed up in XP and Linux partition utilities as I expected. The Pi still booted OK.

I would like to request that !HForm be modified to create a partion table entry that matches the space that was formatted. (With type AD)

I request an extra question “partition table entry” with values 0-4 (0 being no table, 1 – 4 being the position in the table)

reasons:
1. To protect RISC OS drives from being inadvertantly formatted.
2. To make it easy to create an ADFS/FAT (etc) partitioned disk.
(you would first use !HForm, then a normal partition utility on a
PC should work to do the rest.)
3. To test such configurations are stable.

It would also be nice if the ancient default disk shapes could be replaced with some sensible default sizes. (e.g. maximum sizes for lfaus 499MB etc, 128GB for RO4 maximum and Iyonix using UDMA)

Hi Jess. We at ROOL have some plans in and around the HForm area that are being worked on at the moment. We’re still not 100% fixed on the route we’re going but you should certainly watch this space.

Cool. Part of the reason for the specific (hopefully relatively small) change is to allow easy testing of various configurations to find out what actually works and how reliably.

Since the superfloppy style ADFS format appears to allow a DOS style partition table to exist, I really think that a protective partition entry would be useful. Another use would be if someone had a large (500GB) hard drive they wanted to use as backup on RISC OS and another system. The other systems partition tools should allow the rest of the space to be used on its native filesystem. (Run new HFORM create 256GB partition with an entry, plug it into the other system and finish with its tool).

Are there any open source partition tools (like gparted) that could be ported more easily than creating a new tool?

This is one area where I could be potentially quite useful testing, please contact me if you need new tools tested.

Most of what you mention is amongst the stuff we’ve been mulling over. We’ll certainly keep you posted when we get to a point where testing is required.

Just wondering if there were any updates?
I’d also be interested in any developments here, I’ve got a 1TB disc that I’d like to use for filecore/fat32/ext4
Even access to the !RunImage file that isn’t stripped would be great, then at least I can learn how to destroy a disc ;-)
Actually I’d be looking at getting large discs at least readable, so then I could put a 250Gb disc on it, OK it’s still not the full disk – but it’s getting more difficult to get smaller discs now.
I suppose I could just buy a brand new usb disc, but I do like to fiddle ;-)

Even access to the !RunImage file that isn’t stripped would be great, then at least I can learn how to destroy a disc ;-)

The un-stripped !RunImage is here, although unless you’re capable of building things through !Builder you might need to do some fiddling in order to get it to work (the source is sent through the C pre-processor in order to avoid using magic numbers for the filing system numbers, and in order to allow building of debug versions to be easily toggled on/off)