Drives in HDToolBox not detected full size (CHS settings?)

[Pat the Cat]

HDToolbox will almost never display correct values of drives bigger than 4Gb.

In general with big drives, set the boot partition to 3900 MB to be on the safe side. Worry about the rest when you've got a working, booting system.

After that, you have to patch serial.device and file systems to make use of big partitions on big drives... very informative read here.

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=32256

But, if your boot partition will fire up, at least you can get some sort of progress with using the drive as a whole.

Choice of filesystem is important, in that some are more reliable than others. Directory caching is best avoided if your Amiga is not abundant with fast RAM and processor power. I like PFS, but your choices are dictated by what OS you are running.

If they are IDE drives, you will probably have to go with TD64 or IDEFIX solutions, I reckon, to gain full access to their potential storage.

[Pat the Cat]

Always check the c,l,s,devs,libs and fonts directory of every bootable. Tons of treasures to be found.

Pretty good advice. Although it's more dirt than nuggets... most of the time.

I'm not TOO surprised about a .device file running retroactively, on an earlier release. Hardware device drivers are like software libraries for hardware outside of the core basic computer system - so they are more tied to the extra hardware then they are to the core.

Mind you, I must admit I rarely tried this, except as a last resort. Seems counter intruitive. And it doesn't always work, because sometimes the extra hardware is tied down to a further OS by library use or another factor, which is bound to the core in some way.

[Pat the Cat]

One slight variation I would try - first setup the drive with HDtoolbox. Get that done properly. Then shut down all active systems to power off.

Power on, try the install of OS. Some HD types you had to do this, otherwise the drive itself got confused about its own geometry. Maybe with design of SSD, you have to do this, because the old geometry is cached locally on the drive, and you have to zap that with a power off, and then do a cold boot of the drive to make sure the old geometry isn't messing with the new one.

Some drives are just a bit TOO smart like that, and you kind of have to make them into dumb idiots with the whole procedure. After they're setup they are fine. You just can't install an OS on such systems without a cold boot after they are prepared, paritioned etc.

Always use quick format option on solid state media. No point using low level format, that's the drives responsibility with solid state tech. No analog stage is required, the data isn't physically bits of magnetism fuzzily arranged on an disk area anymore.