Amiga Workbench and Amiga Hard Drive Installl (A600)

[Macca]

Well two topics in one really...

I have a 12GB 2.5" Hard Drive for my A600 - I haven't physically put it in the Amiga yet but have been practicing on WinUAE so I don't make any mistakes.  However when I boot from the Install Disk it doesn't allow me to partition the drive.  It also asks me to do a low level format - as I will be using an IDE drive I don't want to actually do this. I wondered about the correct way to do this?

Also my Workbench disks are broken - I do own them - and can take pictures to prove this - I have the ADF images but need them written back to disk.  I would, obviously, pay for the priviledge or provide some small piece of hardware (DVD drive / Replacement Floppy Drive / 128MB PC2100 memory and prove that I own an Amiga / Workbench before you make the disks for me.  But anyway to cut it short I would like someone to write the disks back for me and post them to me (UK).

You can email me: maccaz (at) dsl (dot) pipex (dot) com

Obviously substitute the at with @ and the dot with . and no brackets () or spaces.

I've seen a few websites that would do this but they are too expensive and cost more than the Amiga itself would cost(£25 for a full set).

If anyone could help me out on any of the above I would be most grateful.

Many thanks,


Macca

[blobrana]

Hi
First,
DON`T  low level format the hard drive....

You'll break it.

Have a look at some second-hand websites for the disks, (£5 at most) , like amibench...
(hum, i just noticed someone giving away a free 1200 there)
Oh well..

And when you do get them you'll have to partition the HD into a few partitions (depending on the OS version, with the limiting size of 2Gb)

Then format and install

Easy. :-)

[Hyperspeed]

Firstly I would have to say that a 12Gb is not the best disk to have
chosen for an A600!

The smaller the better in my opinion and personally I would have gone
for less than 2Gb.

The Workbench revision you will be running at won't allow for more
than 2Gb and when you reach this limit you'll start writing over the
first few megabytes. Also HDToolBox really doesn't like partitions
over 1Gb.

If you want you can upgrade to the latest HDToolBox and Workbench 3.5
or better for 2Gb+ but are you really going to fill that on an A600!?

There are only 4,000 Amiga games out there you know!

:-D :-D :-D :-D

One other thing to remember with HDToolBox is when you first start to
SELECT DRIVE TYPE and READ CONFIGURATION, then save. This will allow
HDToolBox to correctly read in the drive's geometry to give your
partitions everything they need.

Then VERIFY FOR ERRORS to see if the drive surface has degraded and if
it has HDToolBox will tell you which "bad blocks" to "map out".
Allowing Workbench to write around these areas of the disk.

Then I would reccomend doing a FULL FORMAT from
Workbench->Tools->Format. This will help you should there be any
trouble with your HDToolBox settings and also clear unwanted data away
should you need to use DiskSalv to recover anything. On a 12Gb drive
this could take a long time so only use this on 2Gb-or-less drives.

:-)

[miles]

With the 600 running a version 2.x kickstart don't get a drive over 4Gb.  With the 600 you need Kickstart 2.05 for hard drive support, some have 2.04 and no hard drive support.  You need more ram to properly support the hard drive under FFS.  Don't low level format a IDE drive!

If you need a drive that big consider buying a expanded 1200.

[Macca]

Well what about multiple partitions - could i not just have 3 * 4GB partitions? Or 4 * 3GB or whatever?

[Thomas]

No. The device driver cannot address the area above the 4GB limit, no matter how big the partitions are.

And even worse, you are able to create partitions above the 4GB limit, but if you try to access them, the accesses are wrapped around to the lower 4GB. So if you write to a partition above the 4GB limit, you will overwrite data below the limit, probably destroying important data, at least corrupting part of the data.

The problem is a 32bit interface between the device driver (usually called scsi.device) and the filesystem (FastFileSystem) or low-level application program (Format, DiskSalv, ReOrg, PC-Task, ShapeShifter etc.).

What you need to do to access above the 4GB limit is to replace both, the device driver and the program talking to it, by a version which can use 64bit commands. The device driver can be replaced by OS3.9 or IDEfix and the file system can be replaced either by the new FastFileSystem coming with OS3.9 or by PFS3 or SFS. There are no replacements for programs like DiskSalv etc. as mentioned above, so beware of using them on partitions above the 4GB limit.

AFAIK both IDEfix and OS3.9 need Kickstart 3.1 and more memory, so no way to use them on a stock A600.

Bye,
Thomas

[BoingBoss]

Hi Macca,

The best hard drive to use with an Amiga 600 computer is one that is less then 1 gig.  I find these drives in old laptops from my local Goodwill.  I can usually buy the whole laptop for less then $15.00.  The 2.5" hard disks in these old laptops are perfect for an Amiga 600.  I have never had any problems formatting them and they work really well.  When it comes to the Amiga, you can not think of it in the same way as a PC.  PC computers waste a lot of memory and hard drive space because of sloppy programming.  The Amiga computer does not waste memory or hard drive space because the programs are programmed much better and for a much better processor.  Have you ever wondered why it took over 10 YEARS for the PC clone computers to finally catch up to an Amiga 1000?  Or have you ever wondered why an Amiga 2500 with a 68060 board OUT-PERFORMS a Pentium III PC computer?  What I am trying to say is that with a PC you would need a 12 Gig hard drive, but with an Amiga computer you only need a 1 or 2 Gig hard disk.  Remember, Amiga programs are smaller in size but do the same amount of work.   :-D

[jeffimix]

On the up and free side however, you can just partition the first 4 gigs.

[Framiga]

anyway, SFS 1.214 requires at least a 68020 CPU and AmigaOS 3.0.

[kd7ota]

BoingBoss wrote:
Or have you ever wondered why an Amiga 2500 with a 68060 board OUT-PERFORMS a Pentium III PC computer?

I really highly doubt that.  I had a Pentium 3 450mhz and 256mb ram, and a Geforce 2 card, which I bet you cant play an MP3 full quality on your 060 and still be able to surf the net and do various tasks without it chocking.

[BoingBoss]

Hi kd7ota,

I was talking about running software and using the Amiga in general.  For instance the Amiga boots up much faster then a PC.  I can load up 10 Amiga programs in the time that it takes the PC to load up Adobe Photoshop.  The PC is so fricken slow that I have a Windows bootup screen that shows an Amiga 500 already running and red text on the bottom that says "Windows is loading, sorry".

Intel & Microsoft   :destroy:

Commodore & Amiga    :love: