DH0: NDOS - argghh! can I recover/repair?

[Noster]

Hi,

> However my DH1: partition is having some problems - it's 90% full (or so workbench claims)
> but it does have a hell of a lot of files on there, I'm wondering if the FastFileSystem
> is similar to the IBM File Access Table (FAT) where if you have a lot of files on a drive,
> the drive can report free space but actually be totally full?

No, the FastFileSystem doesn't use a FAT, it allocates blocks for files or directory entries as required until the disk is 100% full.
Every file uses at least a whole block of the disk. If you have formated the drive with larger blocksizes (e.g. 2048 bytes) even a file of only a few bytes will use 2KB diskspace. So your drive could be full even if the summary of the filesizes isn't as large as the partitionsize.

Noster

[Noster]

Hi,

FFS is a 32 bit filesystem -- as any Amiga-software is 32 bit software. It is able to address 2^32 blocks. If you format the drive with a block-size of 1024 bytes (1KB) FFS could handle disks upto 4 terabyte.
The problem is not the filesystem, it is the exec-device that could only handle disks upto 4 GB in AmigaOS 3.1 or below. There is a patch available for the trackdisk.device that uses 64 bit addresses called TD64. But the easiest way is using AmigaOS 3.5 or 3.9 with that large drives.

Your 2.5 GB drive should be usable with OS 2.0 or newer without any additional patches. The size of the drive would be displayed as negative value but nevertheless the disk is handled correct and can be partioned using the HDToolBox.
I would at least use two partitions, one for the OS and another one for private data so you could avoid any problems with partitions larger than 2 GB.

Noster