HD Installation Problems

[Thomas]

I must add that the drive was partitioned as HD0 @ 400Mb, HD1 @ 1Gb and the rest of the drive partitioned in just under 4Gb lots (18 Gb drive). Is this not acceptable? Should it be just the two partitions not greater than 4Gb?

AmigaOS has a 4GB limit and the limit applies to the harddrive, not to partitions. Partitions can be as large as they fit into the harddrive limits. But with standard drivers the harddrive may not be larger than 4GB.

At each 4GB border the offset wraps around to 0 and the data is actually written to somewhere inside the first 4GB of the drive. So every partition which is outside the first 4GB area overwrites data within the first 4GB. That's what happened to you.

To use more than 4GB you need a file system which supports some new API (either NSD or TD64) and a device driver which offers this new API.

To check if your OS is ready for harddrives >4GB you can use this program: http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online.de/downloads/hddreport.lha
The "check" column in the overview tells you if a partition is safe to be written to.

[Thomas]

Drives following new ATA specs, for example CF cards and probably SSDs too, require MaxTransfer set to below 128KB, othwise files bigger than 128KB might get corrupted. Usually 0x1fe00 is used. It does not hurt to always set MaxTransfer to 0x1fe00 for all drives and partitions.