4.3 gig HD recognised as wrong size

[Thomas]

Yes, but most hdds labeled as 4.3 gig actually are 4.0 gig (= 4.3 billion bytes).

@dandelion: on the hdd label or in the manual or on the manufacturer's homepage you should find the specifications of the drive, e.g. heads, sectors and cylinders. After clicking on "read configuration" in HDToolbox check that these values are correct. If not, correct them by hand.

Note that the exact values do not matter. Only the result of multiplying heads * sectors * cylinders, which gives the total number of blocks on the drive, should match. At least you should not configure more blocks than there actually exist. A 4gb drive has something about 8388608 blocks (4gb/512).

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

Well, according to this document the drive has 9 heads, 63 sectors and 14848 cylinders which leads to 8418816 blocks which is slightly above 4GB. As everything above 4GB cannot be addressed, you should use only  14794 cylinders.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

Oh dear, why can't people read from the top before they give stupid answers ?

[Thomas]

This patch only works if the HDD driver (scsi.device in this case) does support TD64 either. It does not.

You can patch scsi.device either with IDEfix or OS3.9 but still the boot partition must reside below 4GB (because the patches are applied after power on).

In addition more than 4GB of space in a single partition will always cause problems with a variety of programs. Installer being one example, DirOpus another. These programs are not prepared to the fact that multiplying two 32bit numbers might give a result not fitting into 32 bits. This is no matter of drivers.

The easiest method to use a 4.3GB drive is to use only 4GB of it. You may think about patches for drives of 10GB or larger but for around 4GB this really does not make much sense.

Bye,
Thomas