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Re: Inherited a Sam460ex - Looks Good - Issues -Need Advice

Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2016 1:42 pm
by tonyw
It's a matter of personal preference, but I prefer to have many small partitions rather than one or two huge ones. Of course, if you are a movieholic, you may wish to stick to big partitions.

The system partition need only be ~500 MB and you should keep it clean of anything but the distributed system. Have at least two similar-sized system partitions, one as a backup or spare.

Put all your programs on another partition. Put all your photos, MP3s, etc, on other partitions, each to its own. If you have two or more copies of each, then you have a backup that you can switch to in case of troubles. You can also experiment with other file systems if you have a mirror of your partition.

When you have to upgrade the system to OS4.2 (or whatever), you need only install the new system onto the spare system partition and change the boot priorities. Nothing else to change.

Re: Inherited a Sam460ex - Looks Good - Issues -Need Advice

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2016 12:12 am
by nbache
A couple of additional points:

I find it handy (apart from having plenty of partitions instead of one big, like Tony says) to leave a part of the disk unused, e.g. 50 or 100 GB in the case of a 1 TB disk. That way you can always make one more partition if you need it (and one more etc...), for installing a new OS version or for backing up stuff or whatever. And if you are really needing more than 900 GB of your 1 TB disk from the start, you should have gone for a 2 TB anyway (or two 1 GBs).

Having more than one physical disk can help speeding up mass data copying like e.g. backups, if you can arrange to copy from a partition on one drive to one on the other. Copying between partitions on the same drive will lead to much more head movement, which will slow things down considerably. This point would of course be irrelevant in the case of SSD disks.

About SFS: SFS\2 has absolutely no recovery/repair tools, while (IIRC) SFS\0 does. There is no need to use SFS\2 unless you want a partition with a size above SFS\0's limit (I think is is something like 124 GB?), or you want to store files larger that SFS\0's file size limit (2GB, IIRC). If you do, by all means use SFS\2, but be extra careful about having frequent backups (and having made a restore test of them).

Best regards,

Niels

Re: Inherited a Sam460ex - Looks Good - Issues -Need Advice

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2016 12:38 am
by jdupuis
Great news!!
I am posting this using Odyssey on the Sam! The DDR2 PC-6300 SODIMM CL6 arrived!! No more Grim Reaper. "Don't fear the Reaper" kill it by using the correct RAM. So to sum up thus far:
ATX Power Supply pin in connector backed out=Fixed
Bad or wrong video card=Awaiting Radeon HD 5450 2 GB GDDR3
Wrong Ram=Fixed

Using Silicon Motion 502 Video and Sound:
The problem of YouTube video play back persists. Slow Motion no sound.
RunInUAE - Game: Agony - scrolls slow and sound cuts in and out steadily.

Thanks for the HD advice. I'll be getting the video card in the next day or so.

Cheers!!

John

Re: Inherited a Sam460ex - Looks Good - Issues -Need Advice

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2016 1:01 am
by LyleHaze
The advice you have been given is sound. I'll add a minor detail though:
Having important stuff saved to two different partitions makes a lot of sense. Making suere those two partitions are on physically separate disks is also worthwhile.
If you suffer a hard error and lose the entire drive.. Well, you see my point.

Unlike many folks, I have no need to backup photos, nor music, nor movies. So my "big stuff" is not an issue.

Since most of my Amiga time is spent writing programs, I have a rather wicked "backup" script. It will:
create a local "backups" folder if needed.
Create a folder within backups named according to what is being backed up, the version, date and time of day
Copy the makefile, all the .c and .h files from my project to that folder
copy a few other files, related to version and release notes.
It prompts me for new release notes and adds them to the relnotes file.

And finally creates another complete backup directory on a separate drive named "backups:"

I had fun putting the script together for a few days, but now ALL my projects get regular backups to two separate drives.
This goes a long way towards peace of mind, and it's so easy I do it quite regularly.

Good habit to get in to. I'm almost tempted to permanently add a USB thumb drive and have the backups gather there.

Have Fun!
LyleHaze

Re: Inherited a Sam460ex - Looks Good - Issues -Need Advice

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2016 6:19 am
by jdupuis
Hey, you guys are great!

I got an ENVY audio card coming from ACUBE and a Radeoan HD 5450 2GB GDDR3. The new stick of RAM came today. It's all coming back together. I got the paperwork from the original owner in the Sam 460ex box. So it will be pretty much back to the way it shipped from AmigaKit, except AOS 4.1 and update 2. I'll probably have a ton of "what to get from OS4Depot questions" but with 4.1 Final Edition for Sam, I think I'll be ok. My X1000 is my Amiga and this Sam is my "fun" box. Can't wait to see fully running better than I got it. It looks great in a White Silverstone Mini ATX case. Multi Card reader as well as DVD RW. Thanks Tony, Niels and Lyle!

Cheers!!

Re: Inherited a Sam460ex - Looks Good - Issues -Need Advice

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2016 7:31 am
by tonyw
Another happy customer! Well done!