OK now, a few questions. I've had the hard drive in the Amiga and everything was going swimmingly. Then the machine had one of those software errors during a transfer of data and rebooted. When it came back on line all the partitions were NDOS. I must add that the drive was partitioned as HD0 @ 400Mb, HD1 @ 1Gb and the rest of the drive partitioned in just under 4Gb lots (18 Gb drive). Is this not acceptable? Should it be just the two partitions not greater than 4Gb? I also tried slaveing in a DVD/CD ROM drive but didn't really know what I was doing with AmiCDROM 1.5, just too many variables I couldn't answer so was just guessing. I also saw a sweet mod with what looked like a laptop DVD drive which ejected out the back of the machine. Looked real neat! Any advice very welcome!
From what I remember of a "true" Amiga partition, you are best off just sticking with 1 max 4gb partition. A little less does no real harm.
The reason is for the legacy hardware, scsi.device eats RAM up with directory entries, amongst others. One of the options is directory caching on file systems, introduced in WB 3 if I remember correctly. If you have a very large partition with billions of little files on it, the Amiga grinds to a halt trying to cache it all.
AmigaDOS was designed and evolved as a 32 bit max operating system, and while various hacks and mods do let you use big drives and partitions, they all eat resources, which are sometimes scarce in emulators and always in legacy hardware.
IIRC, there were also a couple useful hacks from the period, which did things like write files to a dummy name, then alter the original to a backup, then alter the dummy to the original. That way, a software failure during a write does not trash your whole hard drive partition. I've no idea if these are still widespread or in use on the Amiga, or were perhaps included on later versions than 3.1 of AmigaDOS, but you do get similar "bulletproof" characteristics from current Linux based operating systems. Turn them off during a write operation, they don't care, and startup as normal when power is back on.
