drkenb wrote:david__schmidt wrote:If you want a couple of 32-ish MB volumes on your CF card, then no sweat... but you're kind of mixing metaphors above and I'm not sure exactly what you want to end up with is possible with any storage device, let alone the CFFA3000.
Not sure which metaphors I'm mixing.
Using a volume > 32 MB AND booting from it. You can't have both. GSOS is not capable of that combination. You're evidently not aware of that limitation, hence you're not realizing you're mixing metaphors.
drkenb wrote:But to answer the last question first, I would love to have a large CF card whose entire size would be a single volume from which GSOS itself could launch. I was talking specifically above about a 128 MB card, but I also have a 2 GB CF card that would be ideal for me - one single CF card, 2 GB, formatted as a single GSOS-recognizable volume from which GSOS would boot and I can store everything I wish in that single volume. That was my goal.
You cannot attain that goal with GSOS no matter the storage medium. Sorry.
drkenb wrote:OK, so if I understand correctly, GSOS was made with support for HFS and >32 MB volumes, but GSOS itself can not boot from such a partition and must boot from a ProDOS (<32 MB) volume? Is that correct? When I think back to what I did on the MicroDrive Turbo, that makes sense. (The lightbulb which always floats above my head finally flashed on! It's been a long time since it was ON...) On the Turbo, I had a 128 MB CF card in the first slot, partitioned into 4 32 MB volumes, the first from which GSOS booted. I also had a 2 GB CF card in the second slot, and it was configured as a single HFS volume and fully accessible from GSOS' desktop.
Right, that makes sense, and would work. Boot from something
else, and you can have all the 128 MB or 2GB partitions you want. But the boot partition can't be one big one > 32MB.
drkenb wrote:On a slightly different topic: If (for example) I want to use the entire contents of a 128 MB USB drive, I can not use the CFFA3K's utility but rather must use CiderPress in order to create 3 32 MB disk images and then one disk image a bit less than 32 MB, correct?
Probably so... I can't remember if the on-board formatter will do HFS images. Probably not [edit: it does], and it would take forever at 1MHz. You're much better off building big .PO files using the likes of CiderPress (or fsutil/hdutil (Windows/Mac)) to build zeroed-out files... more on that
here).
drkenb wrote:If so, do you know what the "New Disk Size | Specify Size: xxx Blocks" setting is in CiderPress for that 4th disk image?
Each block is 512 bytes. All you have to do is the math.
drkenb wrote:Or will I need to determine that trial-&-error? Also, would you happen to know if there is slight variablilty among the manufacturers in terms of the number of available bytes on their thumbdrives?
There is definite variability. Do the math based on your available bytes and you will be fine.