New harddrive...partition problem

[Thomas]

Should I just calculate the values and type them in myself, or is there a better partitioning program out there?

Yes. First you should update to Boingbag 2 and retry automatic calculation. If it still fails, get the correct values from the manufacturer and enter them manually.

Note that only the total number of blocks has to be correct. The values for heads, tracks and cylinders can be choosen randomly. Make one cylinder be about one megabyte.

Also note that you must not mix HDToolbox and HDInsttools. The two programs are somehow incompatible. Using HDInsttools to change partitions created with HDToolbox or vice versa might lead to data loss. Once you decided which one to use (I suggest to use HDToolbox as it is the official tool), use it forever.

Last but not least be prepared that a drive labelled as 160 GB will actually have only  149 GB. This is because the manufacturers call 160,000,000,000 bytes 160 GB while 160 "real" GB are 171,798,691,840 bytes.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

Are you sure you use the latest version of HDToolbox ? It should look like this:


And I think it should report the correct size of the HDD, depending on the value for "Total number of blocks". Of course, if the values are read incorrectly, the size is wrong either.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

doctorq wrote:
The problem is that I can't find any information regarding number of blocks. I can find the number of cylinders, heads and sectors, but not the number of blocks.

Well, you should take your sunglasses off when browsing the internet.

On the page you pointed to is a link to the "specification page". In the middle of the specification section there is a line reading "SECTORS PER DRIVE" which tells you the drive has 312,581,808 blocks. Multiplied with 512 bytes per block it has 160,041,885,696 bytes. Looks like the right value.

"Sectors" and "blocks" usually are used in the same meaning. Actually one of them should refer to logical blocks and the other to physical blocks. But nobody consequently uses it this way.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

and I don't know the math exactly

Well, it's quite simple:

Each HDD consists of several disks with two surfaces each. This is just like several floppy disks lying on a stack.

So a HDD with 8 disks has 16 surfaces. Each surface is accessed by one read/write head. So the number of surfaces equals the number of heads.

Now each surface is divided into tracks. Tracks are concentric circles on the disk. Each track in turn is divided into an equal number of sectors.

The collection of the same track on each surface forms a cylinder, so the number of heads is the number of tracks per cylinder.

Now the mathematics:

sectors per track * tracks per cylinder = sectors per cylinder (easy, isn't it ?)

sectors per track * tracks per cylinder * cylinders per drive = sectors per drive.

bytes per sector * sectors per track * tracks per cylinder * cylinders per drive = bytes per drive.

The same with other words:

bytes per block * sectors * heads * cylinders = capacity.

Well, actually a sector should refer to the physical unit as used above, while a block should refer to the logical unit used by the file system to allocate space. A block consists of one or several sectors.

But even in the official AmigaDOS documentation the terms sector and block are totally mixed up, so you have to understand the context in order to know which one is meant.

Bye,
Thomas