Fragment's frustration:
I got this 2.5" IDE really cheap and afaik A1200 is limited to 4gb and this new drive is 4,3gb (8905 cyl, 15 heads, 63 sect/track). Does it work without problems or is the only solution to get AmigaOS 3.5/3.9?
;-) It’s down to the difference between binary notation and decimal notation. The actual limit is 4 binary gigabytes, or 4* 2^32. In decimal notation this number is 4,292,967,296, which rounds up to 4.3 decimal gigabytes. The marketing department usually puts the decimal interpretation on the package because it looks bigger to the layman.
:-( OS 3.1’s FFS on your A1200 will be able to use the first 4,292,967,296 bytes of your hard drive. Any attempt to write above that limit will result in data being written at the address that is 4,292,967,296 bytes lower than what you wanted. This results in a “wrap around” effect, which causes you to overwrite data that’s already there, destroying it. This includes the data in the disk’s Rigid Disk Block, which tells the drive where one partition begins and another ends, and so on.
:-) However, it seems that your drive matches your A1200’s abilities perfectly, so you should have no worries, even without OS 3.5 or OS 3.9.
