HDT is a good friend but a little weird at times

[pVC]

Hmm.. usually you name them on HDToolbox as dh0, dh1 or something like that and then give them names as Graph when formatting it. Or did I get you wrong... although it can be done in other way too Uninitialized sounds like you haven't formatted it yet.. only made partitions with hdtoolbox.

And like other said here, you should notice the 4G HD limit and 2G partition limit of older FFS and scsi.device, if you're using those. Don't make any partition larger than 2GB and leave the last partition's end position _under_ the 4G area of the HD. If there's partition that goes over that 4G limit and you write data on that area, then you're going to lose data elsewhere on HD. Probably lose partition information and data from the beginning of the hd.

If you want to use more than 4G of your HD, then you must to update filesystem to newer FFS (from os3.5-> or patch for older ones), SFS (freeware) or PFS (commercial). In some situations (like when using internal IDE with scsi.device) you have to update your device driver too. I don't know if there's any problems with gvp's scsi device. Safest bet is to use directscsi version of the PFS3, because then it doesn't matter what scsi-device is in use.

[pVC]

Setpatch (from OS3.5->) is just one tool to update the scsi.device in rom. It can be done with other tools too. And it isn't needed when you use some other device than scsi.device (internal IDE-controller)... if the other device already supports bigger drives.

[pVC]

I'd try first if you can make system work with your current setup, but using only max 4G of the HD... then you can see if it's the actual problem.

If you have os3.9 and updated fastfilesystem (version 45.13 or close to it) is in use as it's supposed to be, then it should support big drives and other filesystems shouldn't be necessary (although they're better anyway . I didn't know/remember that you have the 3.9... but if everything is ok, then I'd suspect the scsi-controller's software (in rom)... DirectScsi FS might help...

SFS in that url you mentioned is quite old version. The latest beta by John Hendrikx can be found from http://www.xs4all.nl/~hjohn/ . I'm still using that 1.84 from there. It has worked fine.

Development of the SFS has moved to other developer and those betas can be found from http://home.wtal.de/js/ (or should be... somehow i can only get empty page :/).

About comparison of different filesystems.. I'd say that SFS and PFS3 are quite equal, but PFS3 has better salvage tools and directscsi version (which is removed from SFS). And both are way better than FFS in speed and other features.

Hmm.. I had that Faastprep somewhere, but can't seem to find it atm...

[pVC]

No, I didn't mean that vanilla OS3.9 should updated. I meant that OS3.9 installation successfully updates the filesystem... you haven't disabled any romupdates or something like that which could affect to it.