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Post by rustleg on Oct 31, 2011 14:20:21 GMT -5
I've got a couple of 600GB drives and KNOS sees data partitions I have created on these (each about 500GB FAT32). (It seems that it reads the Master Boot Record to pick up these partitions since there are other areas on the drive which have hidden partitions which it doesn't see).
However when I try to mount them using the icon on the top bar it gives an error: Unable to mount the volume 'DRIVE1DATAD'. Details: mount_msdosfs: /dev/msdosfs/DRIVE1DATAD: Disk too big, try '-o large' mount option: Invalid argument.
Please advise how I can get them to mount.
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Post by Kevin McAleavey on Oct 31, 2011 19:26:38 GMT -5
I've got a couple of 600GB drives and KNOS sees data partitions I have created on these (each about 500GB FAT32). (It seems that it reads the Master Boot Record to pick up these partitions since there are other areas on the drive which have hidden partitions which it doesn't see). However when I try to mount them using the icon on the top bar it gives an error: Unable to mount the volume 'DRIVE1DATAD'. Details: mount_msdosfs: /dev/msdosfs/DRIVE1DATAD: Disk too big, try '-o large' mount option: Invalid argument. Please advise how I can get them to mount. Hang in there ... I'll have to look into this one with the BSD kids ... that's some big drives you got there! I'm envious!  |
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Post by Kevin McAleavey on Oct 31, 2011 19:49:37 GMT -5
Digging into this, might take a little while for an answer though.
Are you seeing this during bootup? Or when the desktop is up? Need to figure out whether it's the kernel or the desktop doing the complaining on this ...
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Post by rustleg on Nov 1, 2011 17:23:19 GMT -5
After all is up and running.
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Post by Kevin McAleavey on Nov 3, 2011 1:17:02 GMT -5
Please advise how I can get them to mount. OK ... heard back from the BSD folks and there's a couple of reasons for that behavior. There IS a workaround but it's a bit kludgy. But first, let me walk through the technicals as to why that is and why BSD threw that error. The MSDOS VFAT/FAT32 file system has a size limit of 128GB. That's all she wrote. In order to have a partition larger than 128GB, Microsoft came up with an utterly hideous kludge themselves called a "sliding window" for anything larger up to 2 Terabytes. In their SDK, they highly recommend against FAT32 formatting above 128GB and highly recommend NTFS instead. However, pluggable vendors didn't listen in order for the drives to be compatible with OSX and Linux. The "workaround" which does the "sliding window" trick is *insanely* memory hungry because in order to do that sliding window trick, they have to import the entire file allocation table for the entire disk surface, store it in memory in BSD/KNOS and then slide up and down through it to fit a window of 128GB across whatever additional size there is. In BSD, they wanted to HIGHLY discourage this but allowed it by doing that special "-o large" conditional mount because storing all of that data seriously impacts memory to the tune of better than 100 Megs of wasted space just to hold those tables. At 500GB, we're talking about 180 Megs of memory lost to KNOS against the amount of installed RAM on a system, so it's significant. They also wanted to make people suffer for it by requiring a MANUAL mount of the drive rather than an automatic mount in order to encourage people to format those drives into 128GB partitions so that this wouldn't be necessary. When we go to build our next release, we've worked out a way to automatically mount it in the future but it can't be done automatically in the current KNOS 8.2 release. So in the meantime, in order to mount those drives, I'll show you a way to manually bring it in but I need to work out with you exactly what we're mounting as far as KNOS goes so that I can give you the correct instructions to do so. In other words, I need to work out a workaround first and we'll have that mounted for you with what you already have. But I need to have you send me some technical details first so I can determine what the proper mount instructions will be. So run KNOS, plug that drive in and when the error appears on your screen, go up to the top, Click Applications, then System Tools and look for KNOS-diagnostics on the menu there. Click that. A file called "diags" will appear on your desktop. The information about the error will be in there, and that's what I need. The diagnostics file is a plain text file so you can look it over before you send it. Once that's there, drop me an email to support@knosproject.com and I'll be happy to look it over and see what the device shows up as in the system and then get you the specifics as to how to mount that bad boy. If we encountered something like this in a custom build, I would have already had this set to automount but you're my first time. Heh. When you email me, just let me know who you are so I know it's you. The handle's fine and nobody respects privacy like we do, so no worries. So YES, we can do this ... just not going to be pretty since we haven't seen this one before. Big disks are usually NTFS-formatted or are NFS mounts. I've never seen it done MSDOS style before and surprisingly, few at BSD had either. But the needed manual stuff IS already in there, just can't do it automagically until I write new code to handle that. One last caveat ... mounting "large" is going to eat a lot of memory and since KNOS is a memory-ONLY operating system even from media, that's going to hurt unless you're running KNOS64 and have 2 gigs or more of silicon in there. If so, no prob. It'll definitely hurt though if you're running KNOS32 and are down near only 1 gig of RAM ... |
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Post by rustleg on Nov 3, 2011 17:51:14 GMT -5
... Microsoft came up with an utterly hideous kludge themselves called a "sliding window" for anything larger up to 2 Terabytes. In their SDK, they highly recommend against FAT32 formatting above 128GB and highly recommend NTFS instead. However, pluggable vendors didn't listen in order for the drives to be compatible with OSX and Linux. Thanks for the explanation - I didn't know this (way above my head) Thanks Kevin but I am going to revisit my partitioning now to see what I really need. By far the biggest space gobbler is my system images - I can partition these off and they don't need to be accessed by anything other than Terabyte's Bootit. Certainly at the moment the rest will easily fit into 128GB. I am starting to digitise my CD music collection and this may become an issue eventually. What other file systems suitable for large volumes you could suggest I look at? I may look again at NTFS but I wasn't too happy with the Linux/Windows NTFS compatibility when I last looked. I have a nice i7 processor with 6gigs of ram so no problem. |
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Post by Kevin McAleavey on Nov 4, 2011 0:23:58 GMT -5
Thanks for the explanation - I didn't know this (way above my head) Thanks Kevin but I am going to revisit my partitioning now to see what I really need. By far the biggest space gobbler is my system images - I can partition these off and they don't need to be accessed by anything other than Terabyte's Bootit. Certainly at the moment the rest will easily fit into 128GB. I am starting to digitise my CD music collection and this may become an issue eventually. What other file systems suitable for large volumes you could suggest I look at? I may look again at NTFS but I wasn't too happy with the Linux/Windows NTFS compatibility when I last looked. I have a nice i7 processor with 6gigs of ram so no problem. If you're going to repartition, shoot for a magic number of 127 so you're in under the limit then. With the 64 bit flavor though and 6 gigs of meat, there wouldn't be any downside to leaving things the way they are though with the big mount. I only see it as a problem if you had less than 2 available. One thing with NTFS and KNOS - we don't allow WRITES to NTFS simply because the filesystem format could potentially allow something nasty to get across to the NTFS drive and so a special build of KNOS would have to be created to permit writes to NTFS. As always, we can do that if someone really wanted to. Do see about holding on to one of those really big ones though if you can - I'd still like to test out some code on one once I work up that "large" modification just to be sure it works. The only large drives we have here are formatted for KNOS. |
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