workbench3.1 and SFS - incorrect partition sizes

[Thomas]

- The problem is, hd2 for example shows up as a 3GB drive, while it really is 15GB in size.

The remainder of 15 / 4 is 3. Normal behaviour of old programs. There is nothing you can do except to use new programs.

For 3.1 to properly recognize a HD larger than 4gb, you'll need to add an OS3.5/3.9 type patch in your startup-sequence called 'New Style Device' or NSDPatch. Then you have to edit the NSDPatch.config file to reflect your hardware and SCSI or IDE setup. Here's the linky:

Complete nonsense. NSDPatch does nothing like this.

[Thomas]

Secondly, I don't think SFS2 partitions work under OS3.x.

They do. You need SFS2 to have partitions bigger than 128GB. Even files bigger than 4GB are supported, if the programs support them.

is this patching the filesystem, scsi.device, or something else?

It patches scsi.device. It does not help with partition sizes because scsi.device does not know about partitions.

[Thomas]

I dont understand what you mean by this.

Imagine one of those old calculators which had a fixed number of digits (8 usually). Now try to calculate 30000000 * 512 and see what the result is when stored in only 8 digits.

Im talking about workbench here. Surely its not safe to write to a partition which size is incorrectly shown?

It's completely safe. The problem is cosmetic only. It's Workbench which is the old program. The file system behaves perfectly ok, there is no danger for your files.

[Thomas]

What "new programs" are you talking about in order for this guys HD to be recognized properly?

There is nothing wrong with his HDD. He uses IDEfix and SFS, both support NSD and TD64 already, so the combination is ok, no additional patches needed.

The problem is Workbench. It multiplies the number of free blocks by the block size (giving the number of free bytes) and stores the result in a 32 bit number, ignoring the overflow. More than 4 billion does not fit into 32 bits.

HDToolbox does the same.  But that's nothing to worry about. It's only the display which is wrong. Internally it works correctly.

[Thomas]

okay, so, just to summarize what you've said: mounting the partitions manually with diskchange is expected and normal behaviour

Sorry, I overlooked this:

- I can only make the other (os3.9-formatted) partitions to show up using the diskchange command

The problem is that all partitions are mounted before IDEfix is run. So SFS checks if scsi.device can read the partition and fails, so it makes them invisible. Your diskchange *after* IDEfix has been run does the check again and this time it succeeds.

It's completely ok to run diskchange this way, if you can live with it. You can add the diskchange commands to user-startup so that you no longer recognise them.

Another solution is to replace c:idefix in startup-sequence by c:loadide reset. By this IDEfix will be loaded resident and a reset will make it active already when partitions are mounted. But this needs an additional reset, just like OS 3.9 or OS 4.