Loss of Chipmem Problem

[carls]

I have an A1200 with 3.1 ROMs and a Blizzard 1260 with 64 megs fast. I use a 2.5" internal HDD with three partitions: 380 megs, and 2 * 1.7 gigs. The HDD is much bigger but I use FFS so this is what I could fit within the limit. I also have an external disk drive.

Now, when booting my computer without the 1260 active (holding down "2" on the keyboard), I have about 1.4 megs of free memory out of the 2 megs of chip available. This is when booting without startup-sequence. When disabling DF0, DF1, CC0 and one of the HDD partitions I can manage to get about another 100k of free memory.

This is not enough for running most AGA demos/games!

When booting with the 1260 active, and thus plenty of fastmem to go around, I have ridicolous amounts of working chip ram available so it's not due to faulty memory chips.

My experience is that when booting an "plain" A1200 without startup-sequence, you have almost all the chip ram free, around 1.9 megs. Any ideas what could cause this memory loss?

[carls]

Your filesystem driver, the memory-based tables it uses to store your filesystem's metadata and the amount of buffers you allocated to the partition.

Larger partitions eat more RAM for the metadata.

Thanks, I suspected it had something to do with this. Half a meg seems kind of steep for the two partitions I need to leave active... To my knowledge I didn't tweak the buffers in HDToolbox when I set the machine up, but I don't remember. Would it be safe to lower the buffers from HDToolbox on the fly (without data loss)? Sorry for the stupid questions, it was a while since I last installed an Amiga.

[carls]

Just install FBlit / FText and configure them correctly.

Remember promote wb to fast ram

I have plenty of chipmem available when the B1260 is enabled because then fastmem is allocated first, as it should be. The problem arises when I disable the 060 board (and thus the fastmem).

[carls]

Hmmm. Only 80 buffers per partition.

I'm not using Whdload - I have lots of older AGA demos that runs fine with just chipmem ( provided threre is enough of it) but crashes on the 060.

When removing all the buffers I get around 1.8 megs free. I hope this will suffice. Thanks fof the help!