OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Storage

Share a 2TB USB drive between Windows and OS/2?

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Dave Yeo:
I understand that for OS/2 to see a 2TB drive the geometry needs adjusting. If done to a USB 2TB drive, will Windows still see it?
I'd like to acquire one and share it between myself (OS/2) and my son who has Win7 and Linux on his box by partitioning into two 1TB partitions and using for backup purposes.

Doug Bissett:
I don't have a 2 TB drive, but I did split a couple of 1 TB drives to share between OS/2 and windows. I used DFSEE to wipe the front end of the drive, then I used Manage Volumes (MiniLVM) to build the volumes. The one for windows was not assigned a LVM drive letter (select 'none'). Then, I used OS/2 to format the OS/2 volume (JFS), and I used windows to format the windows partition (NTFS). If you want to share a volume between OS/2 and windows, I suggest a FAT32 volume, formatted using the DFSEE routine.

roberto:
I with 2tb usb disk, create a single FAT32 volume Dfsee apparently all ok. The first backup from OS2, all ok. In the second backup I stood in a strange way. And when you try to do a chkdsk to external USB, it gave me a trap laptop, I lost partition tables but not from the external drive, in the notebook. Finally I could get it all on the laptop, USB drive and leave it as a single volume in JFS. The proposed Doug Bisset think is the best.
Saludos

ak120:
I don't know of any OS/2 backup program that would really supports external USB hard drives. Ok, it's possible to copy files to them, but how long would a 500 GB or 1 TB backup run in real world. Good chances that it will not complete at all because the lack of reliable USB device drivers under OS/2. Now try to a restore to bare metal from this external drive, quite impossible in an OS/2-only scenario. External SATA or Firewire-800 connections are much faster than USB 2.0/3.0 and have lower cpu load btw.

Doug Bissett:

--- Quote from: Andreas Kohl on December 18, 2015, 04:58:48 pm ---I don't know of any OS/2 backup program that would really supports external USB hard drives. Ok, it's possible to copy files to them, but how long would a 500 GB or 1 TB backup run in real world. Good chances that it will not complete at all because the lack of reliable USB device drivers under OS/2. Now try to a restore to bare metal from this external drive, quite impossible in an OS/2-only scenario. External SATA or Firewire-800 connections are much faster than USB 2.0/3.0 and have lower cpu load btw.

--- End quote ---

What are you talking about? In the real world, USB with 500, or 1 TB (and probably 2 TB - I don't have one) disks work very well (slow, but well). I do multi gigabyte backups to them often, using eCS and the latest Arca Noae drivers (or Lars' drivers). Restore works just as well. I use ZIP to make the backups, and UNZIP to do the restore. I also use RSync to make backups that are much easier to extract individual files from. I do use JFS formatted drives for OS/2 (eCS) backups.

I do agree that eSATA is faster. I don't know much about Firewire, so I can't comment, other than we don't have a working driver. I also agree, that USB does have a heavy CPU load, but that is the way that it was designed, and that is true for all platforms. None of that makes USB drivers "unreliable" for backups. Restore has always worked, for me, when I use a program that is capable of doing it (BackAgain/2000 can't do it any more). Sometimes, SYSINSTX is required to fix the boot record. IMO USB hard disks are far more reliable than using CD or DVD media, and they are far more reliable that tape could ever be (I won't comment on diskettes).

One thing, that I do know, is that using the FAT32 cache program, with a FAT32 formatted drive, WILL cause unreliable operation, no matter what the media is, or how it is attached. It also slows the whole thing, and probably increases the CPU load. I highly recommend REMing the FAT32 cache program in CONFIG.SYS, if you use it. I also recommend not using EAs with FAT32 (very few things, other than the desktop, need EAs). Of course, I don't know why anybody would want to back up OS/2 (eCS) to a FAT32 drive anyway, but stranger things have been known to happen.

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