Note that "HDToolBox" keeps a database of disks. You can always "add new drive type" and there trigger a re-scan of the harddisk, then use this as basis for new partitions. Otherwise, HDToolBox will use whatever it saved the last time it recognized the drive.
Huh, I never knew that. Is that something new?
No, this is a very old feature which goes back to the days of the A590 which shipped with 3.5" XT drives (ST 506 interface, ~20 MB per drive), but would also accept a SCSI drive.
The problem which the database solved was that the XT drives did not necessarily report their respective model and properties correctly when prodded. Commodore shipped a database of known-working drive types and their properties with the HDToolBox program, with the option for the user to add more drive types by entering the respective configuration data manually. For example, if you flipped over the A590 case, you would see a label describing the type, manufacturer and model, along with the number of cylinders/sectors/tracks/heads. If you ever lost the database, or corrupted it by accident, you could at least set up your drive correctly by following the label data. The usual approach would be to pick a database entry which matched the model and manufacturer information.
The problem with hard disk drives not producing reliable information about their respective configuration persisted for a very long time indeed, right until into the mid-1990'ies before the great mergers/acquisitions of hard drive manufacturers left us with only a handful of companies (Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu, Toshiba).
There is some extraordinarily complex code in HDToolBox which tries almost every trick that might work for XT and SCSI drives of that age to figure out the configuration parameters. To those unfamiliar with its purpose the code is perplexing and outright impenetrable. When we updated HDToolBox for the 3.1.4 update, we asked around for help and received kind advice from Ralph Babel and Joanne Dow. When Joanne kindly showed us how the RDPrepX tool approached the same problem as the mystifying HDToolBox configuration code, the penny finally dropped and the pennies just kept dropping. This kind of code is supposed to be as complicated/peculiar as it appeared
Long story short: the database in HDToolBox and the arcane configuration parameter heuristics have no place in a (somewhat) modern hard disk setup program. But for the time being we will be stuck with it
