Format flash drive to ADFS woes

Hello everyone, I am rather new at this posting thing, so I hope I am asking the right questions in the right place.

I recently obtained a BB-xM which I am quite excited about but I’m having trouble reformatting an 8Gb flash drive to ADFS.

The latest RISCOS machine I own is a RPC 4.39 Select, fitted with a Unipod. I was hoping to use this combination to do the above formatting but alas no. The ‘Format’ option on the Unipod USB drive menu is greyed out, I don’t own an Iyonix & !SCSIform seems to be for RO5 only.

Can someone suggest a way around this or point me to a previous posting that I missed which would help?

As a side issue regarding Unipods, does anyone else experience slo-o-ow read/write/delete operations on flash drives? I am assuming it is a RISCOS problem & that ADFS formatted flash drives are much quicker.

As I understand it it’s impossible to ADFS-format a USB device using a Unipod (see here – MassFS 1 isn’t implemented as a FileCore-based filesystem, and it’s FileCore which handles the ‘ADFS’ disc format).

Can someone suggest a way around this or point me to a previous posting that I missed which would help?

The wiki has a guide on how to format a USB drive using a bare beagleboard – see here. The only tricky part is that you’ll need a USB device which is under 2GB in size, so if your 8GB drive is the only one you’ve got then you’ll have to find a way to reformat it first (using gparted under linux would probably be the easiest; I’m not sure off the top of my head what an equivalent tool for Windows would be).

As a side issue regarding Unipods, does anyone else experience slo-o-ow read/write/delete operations on flash drives? I am assuming it is a RISCOS problem & that ADFS formatted flash drives are much quicker.

My UniPod is horribly slow as well (the first thing I did when I got it was to use it for a full hard disc backup to a USB drive – I think I should have done it over the network instead). I’m not sure whether it’s a software or a hardware problem, but you’ll be glad to hear that USB on the BeagleBoard is much faster.

Someone with an Iyonix has offered to format & load my flash drive, so my difficulty has been resolved.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my query.

For information:

I was having trouble formatting an 4GB flash drive to ADFS using SCSIForm 2.55. It all appeared to go fine, but then just sat there at the ‘Writing root directory’ stage forever. I was using the defaults of 9736 cyl, 17 heads, 46 sec/trk, parking cyl. 9737, init. flag 1, LBA flag 1. I properly formatted the drive (‘F’ option), made it bootable with long filenames supported. Large file alloc. unit was the default of 512.

I then tried dropping the number of cylinders down to 9730 (and setting the parking cyl. to 9731) and it worked, producing:

Bytes free = 3,893,797,888
Bytes used = 1,938,432

I don’t why the above was necessary; presumably SCSIForm’s calculations about the max. number of cylinders was slightly wrong. Perhaps this post might help others!