First off, load and run HDToolbox off a floppy disc. DO NOT remove until this procedure is finished.
The partition layout in the following screens are mine. Yours will differ greatly because of the size of the drive you are installing. All numbers the boxes labelled Start Cyl, End Cyl , Total Cyl & Buffers
should not be manually adusted unless you know what you are doing!
Look at the picture below. The box on top shows what kind of drive(s) you have. If you have a 1200 or 4000, don't be alarmed if your IDE drive interface is listed as SCSI. This was done for compatibility with older software. There are three gadgets on the left side- LEAVE THEM ALONE!!! They are way beyond the scope of this article, and you should not touch them unless you know what you are doing. The "low level format" (which NOT the same as the regular format disk menu item in Workbench!) in particular can be bad for IDE drives, and can render some IDE drives useless. Most newer drives will simply ignore this, but don't take a chance.
The button we're most concerned with now is the partition drive button on the right side. Click on it. Now you should see the actual partitioning window (See Figure 2). The long horizontal bar is a visual representation of your hard drive. Depending on your configuration, you may have one or more sections in the bar. Each section is a partition. The information directly below shows the size of the partition. You can click on each partition to make it active (it turns black). Then you can use the slider (blue arrow) below to resize it. You can also use the gadgets below to Delete a partition, make a new partition, change back to the default setup, or get help.
Below that you can see more information. Notice the Advanced options box is checked. This is required if you are going to make additional boot partitions, but we'll leave most of the options at their default. The Partition Device Name box allows you to enter a name for your partition. Usually this will be something like HD0 (under OS 2.04 it might be DH0,) HD1, HD2, etc. The is another box labeled bootable. If you want to boot your Amiga from that partition, this needs to be selected. If it is selected, you can enter the boot priority in the gadget below it. This will normally be 1 for the main boot drive, the one you wish to use under normal circumstances. Other partitions should be set to 0. The Amiga will boot from the highest priority drive (1) unless you use the boot menu to select a different drive to boot from.
Click on the partition, and make sure the settings are O.K. You want the partition (colored black) to be bootable, with a boot priority of 1 so check all the boxes are correct before proceeding.
If you make a mistake or decide not to go through with it, click on cancel and exit. You should be safe, with no damage done. If you're happy with the changes, click on OK, and then Save Changes to Disk. A warning message will pop up (See Figure 3 below). Clicking on Cancel is your last chance to bail. Click on Continue, and the changes you made will be saved to the HD. Click on exit, and HDToolbox will inform you that you must reboot. Make your your Amiga Install disk is in your floppy drive and click on OK.
After rebooting (if all went well) you will need to reformat all the partitions. Click on the partition (which will most likely have a funny looking name) and select Format Disk under the Icons menu. Next you will need to reinstall or restore from backup the Amiga OS and all your programs and data.
Troubleshooting:
If something bad happens, you can use the Default Button in the HDToolbox partition window to get reasonable values for your hard drive partitions again. One last warning- some programs invite exploration and fiddling. HDToolbox is not one of those. Don't change anything unless you you know what you are doing. The actions I've detailed in this article should be safe and effective (I've done this procedure dozens of times without mishap), but if you are careless or too curious, you could end up with a useless hard drive.
