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!
Without a hack for both the filesystem (FFS) and the device driver (scsi.device) you will run into trouble copying anything beyond the first 4gb of your drive. Hardware devices like the Idefix patch the device driver on the fly, software solutions will perform an extra reboot when starting your Amiga from cold. As for the filesystem, most popular would be to use SFS, though some will recommend PFS3 (which, by exception, does not need an updated scsi.device).
The best option IMO would be to install OS3.9 since it updates the device driver (it uses a new software kickstart that does that extra reboot) and replace FFS with SFS 1.84. This does restrict you to put OS3.9 within the first 4Gb of your hard drive though. If you dont want this, you will need to fiddle around with a boot up partition. You should also know that any software that does low level access to your hard drive (ie pc and mac emulators, old tools like disksalv etc) will expect a drive with max capacity of 4Gb.
As for your CD-Rom drive, there are a handful of filesystems you can use to access the drive, I recommend you read the documentation found within these packages to find out how to install it. You can transfer those packages to your Amiga using a 720Kb formatted pc floppy disk and Crossdos found within Workbench 3.1. I recommend looking into AsimCDFS. Good luck.
