Re: [MiNT] Kobold replacement for MiNT

[George Nakos <ggn@hol.gr>]

Title: Re: [MiNT] Kobold replacement for MiNT

Hello Miro,

Monday, April 26, 2010, 9:57:56 AM, you wrote:

Is then Kobold any good?

IMHO it's very good!

One can use KKCommander or plain desktop I think.

Well, recently I backed up my Falcon's drive (about 5gb of data - 30000 files) using a 2nd 1gb IDE hard disk. At first I used mint/teradesk, but copying 1gb (so that the drive will be filled) of data spread across many files was painfully slow using that. So I switched to Kobold, and took roughly 1/6th of the time Kobold did (well I didn't test it with the same file set, but I bet I'd get the same result).

While copying, Kobold has a much more efficient way of reading/writing the files, but there is a danger as I wrote in my first reply. In the superfast mode, it reads and writes to the FAT directly. Which is fine for floppies and old hard drivers, but I dunno what will happen in a big modern partition. The author(s) seem to have thought of this though, and have introduced a dialog in the options that forces "GEMDOS mode" to specific (all if that's what you wish) partitions.

Needless to say, the backup was performed with GEMDOS mode on.

I don't like Kobold exactly because it does suspicious actions even on normal HDD drives, same as Jinnee -- I've got several disk crashes in my lifetime (corrupted FATs etc), as soon as I stopped using Kobold (first step) and then Jinnee (second step), I've seen none.

See above. I think you mentioned that you had IDE errors in the past? Maybe the corruption was caused by this? Of course Kobold might have acted as an intensifier for those problems.

With that Jinnee I'm 100% positive something is going wrong, I remember formatting my disk, installing FreeMiNT + Jinnee, copying some files with Jinnee's copier (IIRC it was from vfat/ext2 to normal partition) and I've seen immediately (!) some errors in Diamond Edge. And no, a HDD was good, it serves me even today reliably. Since then I haven't courage to use Jinnee again ;)

Well, anything goes regarding this - perhaps you were using 060 and Jinnee has some issues with that? I'll wait for others to reply to this and share their experiences.

If anything, we must have stable software running on our Ataris!

-- 
Best regards,
 George                            mailto:ggn@hol.gr