Setting up SFS on a real hd with winuae??

[Thomas]

Here are instructions how to install the needed software for big harddrives in WinUAE:

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=446135&postcount=27

[Thomas]

More information needed. Which file is located where? What's your current directory when you enter the command?

Did you inadvertently enter loadmodule before you entered loadmodule/loadmodule? If yes, enter cd / to move back to the higher directory.

[Thomas]

I unpacked the files (using windows) in the work folder and mounted it as the second hard drive in winuae.

Then in shell i went to work: and then ran loadmodule/loadmodule scsi.device

It is quite unpleasant to help you because you don't answer the questions and the little information you give is so unprecise that it's almost useless.

I guess you didn't preserve the directory structure when you unpacked the archives, did you?

And you completely missed the patchstrip command, didn't you? This is the most important step before loadmodule.

I need to sort this out soon coz i'm running out of space with the 170MB noisy HD that came factory installed.

This is your problem, not mine, isn't it? So why don't you put a little bit of effort into supplying the required information to help you? Or try to understand what's going on and help yourself?

Or just stay with the "keep it simple" principle. Now that you know that 4GB is the limit, you could simply stay below 4GB and all is fine. If 170 MB is what you have now and what served you for the past 10 years, 4000 MB should be overwhelmingly much and last for at least 5 or 10 years more, shouldn't it?

So if you create a 500 MB boot partition, you can install a new OS and put a backup of the old OS on it and still have more than half of the space free.

Then create a 3500 MB work partition for all the new stuff you want to install and leave the rest of the HDD alone. (Better make two 1750 MB partitions because partitions above 2GB will cause other problems you didn't even notice yet.)

All this is possible without installing patches and file systems and such. And if at some point you learn how DOS commands are entered and how the current directory and relative paths work together, you might be able to install the drivers for big harddrives without instructions. Then you can still add further partitions on the yet empty space of the HDD.

Perhaps at some point you even become interested in writing programs for AmigaOS, then you could check the developer documentation and find out yourself where the 4GB limit comes from and what is necessary to circumvent it.

[Thomas]

The rest would not be seen on WB so i set them as FFS and they work.

No, they definitely do not work correctly, although it seems so. FFS cannot access outside of the first 4GB of the harddrive. But it does not care, it simply ignores the overflow which happens when calculating the byte offset to the place where to access. This means instead of accessing the area which you reserved for the FFS partitions, it writes to an area inside the first 4GB of the harddrive which belongs to a completely different partition.

Edit: Instead of a Format i gave it a Quick Format as the initial format. Is that bad? I am now trying a full format.

Quick format is the only working way to correctly format a partition outside of the first 4GB. The Format program has the same problem as FFS. If you fully format a partition outside the first 4GB of the harddrive, it will destroy another partition inside the first 4GB.

SFS is all a mess i think... Even now stuff in the system partion is saying HD0 has a blockid error in block xxxxx expected blockid 0x424e4443, but the block says it is blockid 0x6a727778,

That's what happens when you put a FFS partition outside the first 4GB: it overwrites data of another partition. This is not a SFS problem, this problem is caused by your improper use of FFS.

[Thomas]

Why didn't you stay with SFS for all partitions? Those partitions which are shown by SFS are safe to use and those which cross the 4GB boundary are not shown. With FFS you never know.

And why didn't you take PFS3 into account at all? Now that it's free, PFS3 is the best choice for 68k Amigas. It has similar features like SFS and is even faster. And with the PFS3ds version you can increase your space limit to 8GB (all that HDToolbox shows without a new scsi.device).