Amiga HDD Partition just became NDOS

[Piru]

@Everblue

Theproblem is that when I double click the partition's icon in Workbench itstates that there are 3134 megs free, when there should be 8g. What am I missing?

Workbench 3.1 doesn't understand partitions larger than 4GB. Basically when the math overflows 32bit it gets total size and free size wrong. In workbench use this is no problem, other than that the free storage figures are "off".

Sometimes some "smart" applications (often game HDD installers) perform storage availability checks and refuse to write files to disk if they think the disk is full. This happens when the free storage gets close to x * 4GB + small_amount. If this happens, just write some dummy file to the disk so that the free size (as reported by workbench 3.1 for example) wraps to <4GB again. Once the installer has completed you can delete the dummy file.

[Piru]

@Everblue

So, if I try to copy copy filies in the HDD, once it goes over the 3gigs, will it give me an error that the HDD is full, or it will copy everything regardless?

It depends on the application. Most (including Workbench and Copy CLI-command) do not perform any "is the disk becoming full?" -checks but rather trust the filesystem to report an error once full. As such they will work just fine with any filesystem size (even though Workbench reports the filesystem total and free capacity wrong).

If the application does perform these checks, it usually depends on the age: Older apps mostly fail in this fashion (back then no one expected HDDs sizes to grow over 4GB...). New applications should not have this problem.

Anyhow, if you do get the problem you can use Workbench or Copy command to "workaround" the issue as described in the earlier post.