Installing a big hard disk

[Thomas]

Now, I have to choose drive type but none of them seems to be the best. For example, with SEAGATE ST51080N I have only 1 gb with two partitions.

If you had an original WB 3.1 install disk, there should be no models in the list. What you see is the list of harddrives the previous owner(s) of the disk installed. Surely none of those match your specific harddrive. This list is completely useless. Nobody ever installs the same model of harddrives twice in his life.

I can create a new type but I don't know its parameters. I also clicked the 'Read Configuration' button but says the size can't be read.

What are the parameters HDToolbox uses after Read Config?
And what is the exact model number of your HDD so that one can search for documentation on the net?

PFS3 is NOT in the list of file systems so I've added it (PFS3-060) with DosType= 0x444f5303 but it says 'International (FFS)' in the file system name.

444f5303 is the identifier for FFS International. Why did you enter it? Please read the documentation which comes with PFS3. It describes very detailed how the file system is installed correctly.

[Thomas]

The PDF says that the drive has a total number of blocks of 143,374,744. So you should select values for cylinders, heads and sectors (per track) so that cylinders * heads * sectors becomes next to 143,374,744 but not bigger than that.

Also make sure that heads * sectors is next to 2000, otherwise not enough space will be reserved for the partition table.  heads * sectors (per track) is the value for sectors per cylinder.

[Thomas]

You may be better off using PFS-060ds (Direct SCSI) If you're running Workbench 3.1, otherwise you'll be limited to just under 4gb of Hard disk space :-

This is not true. He is running his SCSI drive on a Phase5 controller which supports TD64. Together with PFS3 this is the ideal combination without limits. The DS version wil work, too, though.

If you are running OS 3.1 or earlier, you may be better off using 'HDInstTools' From Aminet

This is not true, either. HDInstTools is incompatible to all other partitioning programs. It should not be used.

[Thomas]

TD64 is nothing you can "install". It is either built in the driver or not. And for Phase5 drivers it is built in. Phase5 is one of the parties who invented TD64 and agreed to it as standard.

What you can install the the patch for FastFileSystem to support TD64. But if you use PFS you don't need to patch FFS because you don't use it anyway.

[Thomas]

Ah, I thought TD64 was something to install, similar to NSDPatch, but am I correct in saying this chap won't be able to fully partition his 74gb drive using an older HDToolbox?

Robert.

No, HDToolbox works correctly. It only tries to calculate capacities with 32bit numbers which certainly overflows above 4GB. But this only affects the sizes which are displayed in the GUI. Internally it works with cylinder numbers and this works correctly.

[Thomas]

I use HDToolBox under WorkBench 3.1.

I'm here right now trying to figure out how to set this HDD up. In a manual I've read it has 90773 cylinders and 2 heads. I would need blocks per track and blocks per cylinder. As Thomas said, we have 143,374,744 blocks (sectors). Besides, at the end of this link http://discountechnology.com/Seagate-ST373207LW-SCSI-Hard-Drive we can see: 181,548 tracks

Blocks per track = 143.374.744/181.584 = 789
Blocks per cylinder = 143.374.744/90773 = 1580

You make it far too complicated. The values for cylinders / heads / sectors are logical values needed by dos.library. They are in no way related to the real physical geometry of the disk. You can choose them freely.

I already told you that the formula is

cylinders * blocks per track * heads = total number of blocks

and

blocks per track * heads = blocks per cylinder

and that blocks per cylinder should be next to 1 MB (2048 blocks). Also no value should exeed 32768 too much.

So we know that the drive has 143,374,744 blocks. This is a difficult number for calculating nice cylinder sizes because it is only divisible by 8 and 17921843 which is a prime number.

Well, if I just ignore that I would choose

Cylinders = 70007
Heads = 8
Blocks per Track = 256
Blocks per Cylinder = 2048

This wastes 408 sectors in the end of the drive (204 KB).

Or if I made cylinders more near to 32768 I would use

Cylinders = 35003
Heads = 16
Blocks per Track = 256
Blocks per Cylinder = 4096

This wastes 2456 sectors in the end of the drive (1228 KB).

With these parameters HDToolBox reports the HDD has 397 mb :eek:

It's not difficult to get negative sizes. If those parameters were correct, the size should be less than 0, isn't it? Because we are talking about more than 4 gb.

We know that the drive has 143,374,744 sectors of 512 bytes each. This means that the real capacity of the drive is 73,407,868,928 Bytes. If you divide this by 4GB (4,294,967,296 Bytes) you get 17 times 4GB plus a remainder of 393,424,896 Bytes. The remainder, i.e. a number less than 4GB, is the only part of the capacity which can be stored in 32bits. Thus this is the value HDToolbox displays as size. Only if the remainder is larger then 2GB, it will be displayed as a negative number. In your case a display of 375 MB is correct.

About the filesystem, I've seen this somewhere:

Custom file system PFS3-060ds
Mask 0x7ffffffe
mas transfer 0x00ffffff (UPDATE - now set at 0x0001FE00)
block size 512
buffers 300

Please don't read "somewhere". Please read the documentation of PFS3!

Is really possible install this HDD with workbench 3.1 or I need a higher version?

Yes, it is possible. The question is whether you really want such a big drive with AmigaOS. Once the drive has been installed successfully, you might want to fill it with files and install software on it. There are many software titles which also have problems with numbers bigger than 2GB or 4GB. These titles may refuse to install themselves to partitions with more than 2GB free space or may later refuse to save data to these partitions because they think that there is no enough free space.