What is the hard disk size limit?

[Thomas]

On my A1200 and A4000 I have 8 GB drives with a 500MB System and 2 x 3.6GB Partitions.

This won't work without additional software. Kickstart 3.1 with its built-in IDE driver and the built-in file system cannot access outside of the first 4GB of the drive. The IDE driver recognises drives up to 8GB, but if you create a partition in the upper 4GB it will use the same space as other partitions inside the first 4GB, so the partitiions will overwrite each other.

There is FFSTD64 on Aminet which patches the file system to allow to use the full 8GB (even as one partition, no need to make a smaller system partition). You need to patch the IDE driver as well to get more than 8GB. IDEfix97 is such a patch for the IDE driver, for example. OS 3.5 and 3.9 come with new IDE drivers, too.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

from your answers I can understand that I can have as many partitions as I like as long as none of them are more then 4Gb large.

NO !

Read my above reply. It's dangerous to create partitions outside the first 4GB of the drive.

[Thomas]

while with fixes the maximum is 8GB

With one fix (file system) the maximum is 8GB. With two fixes (file system + IDE driver) the maximum is 128 GB. Only with OS 3.9 + BB2 + fixes from Aminet more than 128 GB is possible.

All that only applies to the internal IDE controller. Other controllers have different limits (although the 4GB limit is common to all drivers and file systems).