Amiga 1200 HD Problem

[Thomas]

When I try this it appears to work

Yes, but it is dangerous. You cannot use more than the first 4GB of the drive. If you fill up the second or third partition, one day your first partition will loose all its data because it is overwritten by the other partitions.

You should create a 900 MB boot partition and two 1500 MB data partitions for now and leave the rest empty, then your data is safe.

when I am installing OS3.1 when it gets to the fonts, it says there is not enough room to install the fonts

That's not related to the above. This message appears because there is more than 2 GB free. These high numbers appear to be negative for the installer. Make smaller partitions, then this will not happen. Or fill the partition until less than 2 GB remains.

(or install NSD?)

NSD does not help for >4GB. Actually it does not do anything useful.

I've got a 80 gig drive and I'm using NSD and smartfilesystem without any issues

I am sure there is something else in addition which you use, because even with NSD it is not possible to access more than the first 7.8 GB of the drive.

NSD just translates TD64 commands into HD_SCSICMD, but the hardware access is still done by the original driver and this original driver can only see 7.8 GB.

[Thomas]

you still need NSD or TD64 to use HD's larger than 4GB. If that is not a true statement, I shall be dipped!

Well...

NSD and TD64 are command sets. They cannot be installed seperately. There is an NSDPatch program. But as mentioned above, it is not needed in any case whatsoever.

IDEfix already supports both command sets and large hard drives. So you don't need to install anything else on the hardware driver side.

But to use NSD or TD64 you also need a file system which supports these commands.

There is an FFSTD64 patch on Aminet which makes the standard FastFileSystem use TD64 commands.

And there is SFS (SmartFileSystem) of course.

PFS (ProfessionalFileSystem) is another solution, but it is commercial an only available second-hand.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

DoogUK wrote:
i forgot to add...my wb install disk contains the latest FFS in the L drawer  :-)

What do you mean by "latest" ? The very latest version of FFS is 51.10 and is only available with OS 4.0 Classic. The latest version which comes with OS 3.1 is 40.1 and is not able to cope with large hard drives. You need either version 43 (Commodore beta), version 44 (result of FFSTD64) or version 45 (OS 3.5 or 3.9).

And it does not matter what is stored in your L drawer. Nothing from there is used. To install a file system you have to use the Add/Update menu in HDToolbox.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

If you really want to switch from non-split to split mode you have to reinstall the *first* 4GB part before you reboot. You cannot keep the 8GB installation if you want to enable split mode.

If you want to keep non-split mode, you can try fixhddsize to make the rest of the drive available for partitions. But be aware that the upper 12 GB are only accessible when the eide driver is running.

The driver built into Kickstart can only see 8 GB (7.8 GiB).

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

DoogUK wrote:
And overwriting the the Fastfilesystem from L: on your 3.1 install disk, surely thats the version your HD is installed with?

Yes, that's true. If you boot from the Install diak and install a HDD for the first time, FFS is loaded from the L drawer on the disk.

Bye,
Thomas