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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: fishy_fiz on August 12, 2011, 03:33:33 AM
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Having just accidently killed the old drive in my amithlon/os3.9 box Ive replaced it with an older 80gig one. All well and good, but trying to prepare the hdd with hdtoolbox shows it as a much smaller drive (18.7 gig if I recall). Experimenting I tried changing the drive geometry (head, cylinders, etc.) until the size closely matched the actual drive. While this appears to work (partitions created/formatted/files added) Im not convinced all is exactly right and there appears to be slight pauses in hdd access every now and again. Can anyone tell me please how to adjust the drive geometry correctly ?
Thanks in advance
p.s. for those unfamiliar with amithlon it behaves the same as an actual 68k amiga, so advice that would apply to a "real" amiga will mostly apply here too.
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Find the LBA value which is printed on the HDD's label or in the manual and compare it to the "total number of blocks" output by HDToolbox in the geometry section. The number of blocks should match the LBA as closely as possible, but it must not be higher.
If this is right, the geometry should be ok. Other values don't matter. Only the number of blocks per cylinder should be big enough so that two cylinders can hold the file system code and the partition table. For IDE harddrives 1008 or 2016 blocks per cylinder are usual values.
Increase the number of buffers per partition to increase speed. Or use more advanced file systems like SFS or PFS3.
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Funny thing is that I also had the same problem with setting up a 80 GB harddisk on my A1200, where HDToolBox would only show ca. 18 GB. My solution was to first use the AmigaOS 3.1 version of HDToolBox for installing the harddisk, then I booted the AmigaOS 3.9 CD and did the rest from HDToolBox there. After that I was able to use the full 80 GB of the harddisk.
I belive there is a bug somewhere on the AmigaOS 3.9 CD which causes this type of problems.