Partition Manager offers Pi boot drive initialisation, with adjustable FAT / FileCore sizes and options to select stable or beta Pi Firmware and stable or nightly RISC OS builds. Optionally it will pre-configure the drive with the current Harddisc4 contents, NetSurf, PackMan, NVMeFS/WiFi drivers and their dependencies.
A smaller lite version is provided below for RISC OS 3.1x machines, with Pi boot drive initialisation removed.
Available below as an attachment for non-networked/pre RiscPC machines, or via PackMan using the source URL detailed at the bottom of this post.
Features
- Supports RISC OS 3.x onward, with no external dependencies
- Supports full-disc unpartitioned FileCore drives, GPT and MBR partition tables and MBR partition tables with an overlayed FileCore drive (Pi)
- Supports drives hosted on the following filesystems:
- ADFS / ADFS4
- ATAFS
- HDFFS
- IDEFS
- MassFS
- NVMeFS
- SCSIFS
- SDFS
- ZIDEFS
- Supports initialising a Pi Boot drive, with selection of either the last stable or latest version of HD4 contents, Pi Firmware and RISC OS version
- Initialisation of partitions as FileCore or FAT16/32
- Supports 512n, 512e and 4Kn drives if the underlying filesystem supports them
- Supports initialisation and modification of partitions on most legacy IDE Podules under RISC OS 3.x
- Supports the following IDEFS based Podules/hardware:
- A9home
- APDL
- Beebug
- HCCS
- ICS
- Risc Developments
- Simtec
- STD Unipod
- Watford IDE
- ST506 initialization (partially tested)
- RISC iX partitions (read-only)
Changes since 1.03
- Added drive identification on Watford Electronics IDEFS
- Added Watford support to IDEFS
- Was failing to read the FileCore DiscRec on 256 byte sector drives
- ATA IDENTIFY decoder wasn't reading the drive Serial number
- After detecting a RISC iX partition on an ST506, it would fail to recognise the Filecore partition on the same drive
- Split RISC iX partition support into a dedicated "Partition"
- Added support for RISC iX partitions that start at cylinder 0
- Added support for R-Comp's NVMEFS
- Corrected an issue where unallocated area were being marked as read-only
- Added the option to hold SHIFT when right-clicking on partitions to allow deleting protected partitions
- ROOL NVMe now ignores namespaces with no LBA allocated
- ROOL NVMe fixed an issue where it didn't exit early if the max logical drive count is exceeded
- When formatting a FileCore partition on a 4Kn drive, it was erasing the BootRec after it had been written causing the format to fail
- Corrected RISC iX detection on 4Kn
- Fixed a bug where DefectEnd% might be undefined when formatting FileCore
- Corrected the protective MBR partition for FileCore when initialising a Pi Boot drive to start at LBA 1 instead of 0
- Added a drive menu option to overlay an MBR partition table, if the drive is a full-disc FileCore with unused space after the FileCore area
- Added write verification to ADFS, NVMeFS, MassFS, SCSIFS, ZIDEFS
- Fixed an issue when formatting FileCore, where BigDisc% wasn't being set early enough
- When capping partition sizes to FileCore limits, it wasn't accounting for the sector size
- Fixed various issues when working out the CHS values for MBR partitions
- Moved override key checks for SHIFT, ALT and CTRL to functions
- Holding SHIFT when opening the Drive Initialise or New Partition dialogue will now override partitioning type restrictions
- Replaced FileCore as a partitioning type in all filesystems with "None"
- Changed the way the max partition size allowed is calculated, to account for drive partitioning
- Fixed a potential Null-Dereference being triggered when validating an LBA range is valid
Partition Manager is modular in design, allowing additional filesystem support to be added without altering the main program. Refer to the documentation below for details on internal variables, procedures and functions required to add filesystems, partitions and formats.
NOTE: On networked RISC OS 3.5+ machines, use the PackMan distribution to receive automatic updates. Add the following URL to the PackMan sources:
Code: Select all
https://www.jaspp.org.uk/packages/releaseNOTE: This software is used at your own risk and is provided on a best endeavours basis. Always ensure a backup is taken before modifying partitions on existing drives
Please provide feedback / debug reports in the feedback thread. Debug output can be written to !PartMgr.debug/txt by holding ALT when launching. Contact details can be found in the application help file.
NOTE: As of 25th May 2024, NVMeFS 0.03 that is currently provided on the ROOL site is missing extensions that Partition Manager relies on to inform NVMeFS that the drive contents have changed following partitioning/formatting. NVMeFS may not be fully supported until the extensions are added and tested - Formatting might fail, or at minimum a physical reboot will be needed immediately after formatting to avoid issues. Creating a Pi Boot drive on NVMeFS will not be possible until this is resolved. RISCOSbits are aware and will hopefully resolve the problem soon.