Looking for a patched scsi.device for large IDE drives

[Thomas]

Oh dear, where does all the mud come from you are trying to publish here?

Fact is:

- the unpatched scsi.device uses CHS addressing scheme on the hardware side
- through HD_SCSICMD (Direct-SCSI) it allows to access the entire size as reported by the drive through CHS.
- the official limit for CHS is 16384 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors which results in a capacity of 7.8 GiB
- only some (cheap) CF cards reports their true size in CHS and thus allow more than 7.8 GiB to be accessed.

So no matter how large the drive is, if it follows ATA specs, with unpatched scsi.device you only get 7.8 GiB.

To go above 128 GiB you need not only LBA addressing but even 48bit LBA addressing. This is not available without a patch.

Talking about NSDPatch, this does not give you any benefit in any case. If you don't patch scsi.device, it gives you access to 7.8 GiB which can be achieved easier with a proper file system. And if you do patch scsi.device, it is already NSD-compliant and you don't need NSDPatch at all.

[Thomas]

PFS3ds  works perfect without NSD patch and support big partitions...tested up to 76 gb with the standart scsi.device v39 in rom

I just tested this version...is a version done by Toni- winuae author
it doesn't support big partitions without a new scsi.device

Your first test was inaccurate. You created a big partition but you did not test if you can fill it with data, too.

seems is hack or patch based on the PFS3 common version but no based on the direct scsi version

PFS3AIO incorporates TD64, NSD and Direct-SCSI as well as support for Kick 1.3. And it checks if the end of the partition can be accessed.

A partition which does not work with PFS3AIO will not work with PFS3DS, either. You just don't notice at once.

however seems the NSD patch is needed to make HDtoolbox works correctly...otherwise HDtoolbox can'tt recognize the drive correctly or you can't set the correct drive parametrs when the drive is virgin or unformatted

That's nonsense. There is nothing in NSDPatch which helps HDToolbox to look at the harddrive in a different way.

Only scsi.device V43 can see the drive correctly. And it does not need NSDPatch because it already is NSD-compliant.

I remember I installed NSDpatch + and scsi.device v43 when I purchase the 80gb hardisk
after you set the drive and you did the PFS3 partitions in hdtoolbox...you can remove those patches safety...there are not needed anymore

You're living rather dangerous.

Firstly PFS3 does not run any better with NSDPatch than without. You don't need NSDPatch at all.

With scsi.device V43 you can initialize the harddrive with its correct size and create partitions for PFS3DS. But if you then remove the V43 patch, you are limited to 8GB again. If PFS3DS shows the partitions as valid this just means that you don't have more than 8GB of data yet. Once you cross the 8GB boundary with data you will get read errors unless you reactivate the V43 scsi.device (or IDEfix or FastATA.driver or .... you need only one).

You should use PFS3AIO instead. It checks if the end of the partition can be accessed and does not show a partition as valid if it can only be accessed partially.