CF Media Quirks

[jessenator]

I've had very isolated issues with either of the CF cards used (with the appropriately "cheap" IDE adapter) and wonder if the following from an older thread is the solution:
 

You have to use newer utilities designed for solid state memories. And chose HFS for a partition. I think the newer partition magics can do it. 

Also there is a free utility that I use that will take an existing partition no matter what it is, and re-align it on its own as long as there is some freespace. I think its AOMEI or something along those lines. 

Otherwise if its not aligned, your going to have consistent corruption issues. As much as I love solid-state memory as disk drives, They aren't really friendly with older file systems. Some SSD utilities can handle older filesystems, and some cannot. 

…

Also if your using CF cards with built-in wear leveling, Dont partition the whole card... Partition only 75% of it, so that leaves free-space for the controller to use that area for sector wear leveling. 

When writing or loading savegames (specific—the only instance this error consistently comes up) I'll regularly, but not constantly, get a disk error (and now I'm away from the machine I can't remember the ID…) which I think is related to the Catalog File on the disk.

For kicks I installed Norton Utilities 4.x.x and it can never seem to repair the issue (while booted from a different partition). I haven't yet made a bootable CD image that will work on the 4400 (system enabler…), but that's in my plans.

The 32GB CF card was originally set up either with DriveSetup from the OE 7.5.3 4400/200 restore disk or the 7.6.1 retail disc, but my money is on the 7.5.3 version. Should I seek out an alternative drive utility that can manage the aforementioned alignment for SSDs? Also, I did partition all the available space— there's the primary partition of 2GB and then two secondary partitions for storage split with the remaining ~30 GB. Should I start over and leave a bit of "free space" on the card as mentioned in the quote above?

Also, I'm not using VM as I read it will excessively wear out SD and CF media. I'm using a SanDisk Extreme, so bus speed disparity should be ruled out(?)

While running Norton, I would get massive batches of errors (mostly creation dates because I've hit that CUDA reset more times than typically would've been) and they never seemed repaired, as mentioned earlier. If there's a better utility, I'd be interested in knowing what it is.

Thanks!

 

[jessenator]

bump — anyone have thought on this?

 

[Cory5412]

Sorry this isn't particularly well-organized.

Maybe consider using LaCie silverlining, there's a version from 1998 that I used with the SCSI2SD v6 on my 8600.

But: If it looks like a filesystem error, and smells like a filesystem error, and acts like a filesystem error, it's probably a filesystem error and repartitioning or reformatting the volume is the thing I would try first.

As to alignment issues, I've heard exactly one time ever that there's a potential for reduced performance, but never that there is a potential for actual operational errors, perhaps outside of very performance/latency sensitive systems.

Also: just to trot this out, there's, as far as I know, no evidence that having VM on, presuming you have enough RAM, will actually cause excessive paging to disk. If it did, we would have noticed (in major reduction of performance on systems with origianl disks). It can reduce your applications' RAM usage a little bit. (I leave it on on my 8600 because with 160 megs of RAM and 9.1 and some 9-contemporary apps, I notice the reduction offered by VM, but in, say, 7.6.1 the difference is a lot less.)

In terms of the partitioning style - 7.6 is really the first release where very big partitions are well supported, so if you want to use >4GB partitions then you should use 7.6.1 or newer. The effects of just-HFS formatting on 15-gig partitions will be annoying, but not severe. I've got a 30gb disk in my PB1400 with three partitions, all plain HFS, and it's fine.

Anyway, TL;DR I'd try re-partitioning or re-formatting it from the boot CD of whatever OS you're using.

If (I just noticed) that it just happens to specific files, you might try just deleting those files - if they are broken and you copy them to a new OS install they might still be broken. You could try Disk First Aid to see if it can repair the volume or those files before reformatting, too.

 

[jessenator]

Thanks for the reply, Cory.

I'll give SilverLining a try. My main challenge (with the 4400) is I cannot boot from the 7.6.1 retail CD. The only solution I've found is to use the OEM 7.5.3 restore disc, then an update to 7.6.1 using the retail disc. I suppose I can live without every ounce of space on the CF card being used…

Can SilverLining add partitions to "free space" not formatted from the original install? I.e. if I was to make a 2GB partition, with the remainder unused, could I go back with SilverLining and re-allocate some of that space?

As far as the error, it's not really specific files or locations—incidentally, the same error happens under 8.1 and 9.1 on the 4400 with every CF card I have— I'll try more tests with other programs, like Illustrator or photoshop, and even simpletext to see if the error persists.

Edit: Side note— simply transferring files via my Mac Pro 1,1 on 10.4.11 shouldn't cause problems, correct? 

 

[jessenator]

I've gotten this error to occur on my G3 mini tower with a spinning drive under 8.1 as well.

I don't recall this ever happening on our iMac as a teen, so I'm trying to isolate what the issue could be.

Could it be accelerator related? It happened on my 4400 and now on my MT

I've run disk first aid on the mt to no avail.

I can't get the burned image of Norton (os 8.5) to boot, so I can't try that just yet. I might try to install to another CF card and see what's going on, but any other insight would be appreciated.