OS3.9 More Newbie Questions

[EchsBachs]

Ok,

So ive been officially breaking my A4000 about twice a day now. And I have reloaded OS3.9 more times than I care to remember LOL

My question is this. On an A4000 with OS3.9 do I need to do all those patches I see around the net to get full use of my 233gig HD?

What I mean is I see in the documents for OS3.9 it supports large drives and greater than 4gb partitions, But when I try to do this and format drives I get not a dos disk and it crashes...

Even if it doesn't see all of the 233gigs that much isnt as important to me as having a large work drive (maybe about 50gb).

I tried to do the SCSI patches I see around for the IDE bus, but maybe thats for 3.1? Because when I did it twice on 3.9 it completly blew up on me.. LOL

So basically, is there a guide, for someone like me, on how to make this happen?

[Gulliver]

To get full use of your 233GB drive YOU WILL need the scsi patch. Otherwise go safely upto 8GB and waste the remaining space!
Your format crashes are probably asociated with an unsupported HDD size
Again you can only reach 8GB without patching, nothing else!
Simple Guide:
-Dowbload the scsi patch (make sure its either version 43.45 or 44.2)
-Make sure you have spatch executable in your C: directory
-make the patch according to docs using the cli
-copy the newscsi.device to for eg: DEVS:
-download loadmodule utiltity from aminet
-edit your startup sequence and place a line like LOADMODULE DEVS:NEWSCSI:DEVICE, just before the line that runs the Setpatch command.
-edit the setpatch line: adding the parameter NOSCSIUPDATE
-Reboot and voila!

Good Luck, the difficult part is patching the scsi.device correctly!

[EchsBachs]

That is so true that is the worst part

I have had to spend hours so far recovering from that failing.. It's not fun.

So far 3 times I have used ExtractModule as the commands for the A4000 and bam, I get the file is too big, the machine locks, and Im back to building it all from scratch on 3.1.. Not fun..

This is why I asked if there was a more detailed guide

Then the doc's say this line:

Now you can choose between installing the bugfix only (#?.ld.strip.pch
files) or bugfix plus coldstart patch (#?.ld.strip.NEVER.pch files). In
case that you have IDE or NCR SCSI devices installed (from which you want
to boot), you *must* install the normal patch.

Um.. What's the "normal" patch I must install? LOL

But, the fact that ExtractModule on the scsi.device keep's killing my machine and I have to do this convoluted WinUAE build of the hard drive to start all over again because I don't have workbench 3.1 floppies, makes me very nervous about all this

[EchsBachs]

Yup. Same deal.

ExtractModule: Module too large error.

So I can't even build the patch.

Anyone care to send me a patched scsi.device for an A4000 desktop with the stock IDE controller?

[save2600]

Why in the heck are you using such a large HD? Is it the only one around you've got or something? To maintain the highest level of happiness without all this patching nonsense in 3.9, stick to a HD that's 10GB-20GB in size and partition it logically considering the built in filesystem you're using:

80mb-500mb for AmigaOS and 4gb-8gb-12gb-16gb for your other partitions. Just a suggestion as that's what I do for work:, programs:, utilities:, games:, etc. No way in shitsville are you ever going to fully utilize all that space you have now. Amiga programs and files are simply NOT that large! lol

[rkauer]

Anything over 128GiB (128 digital giga-bytes) will put you in trouble with Amigas.

 Even patching the SCSI.device to use over 128Gb will not make you able to use this over-128Gb storage space.

 So, why use it anyway?

[EchsBachs]

Because its a working drive I had.

If I don't patch it, OS3.9 thinks it's a 7.2gig HD.

If I edit the drive manually, it shows up as a 233meg drive, but if I try to make more then 3 partitions it kills the system.

For example, I can make a 4gig boot and 10gig work, No problem

if I make 2 more 10 gig partitions, it's dead.

[Tumbleweed]

To get full use of your 233GB drive YOU WILL need the scsi patch. Otherwise go safely upto 8GB and waste the remaining space!
Your format crashes are probably asociated with an unsupported HDD size
Again you can only reach 8GB without patching, nothing else!
Simple Guide:
-Dowbload the scsi patch (make sure its either version 43.45 or 44.2)
-Make sure you have spatch executable in your C: directory
-make the patch according to docs using the cli
-copy the newscsi.device to for eg: DEVS:
-download loadmodule utiltity from aminet
-edit your startup sequence and place a line like LOADMODULE DEVS:NEWSCSI:DEVICE, just before the line that runs the Setpatch command.
-edit the setpatch line: adding the parameter NOSCSIUPDATE
-Reboot and voila!

Good Luck, the difficult part is patching the scsi.device correctly!

Or alternatively install idefix97. Doing so will overcome the constraints of the bog standard scsi.device. You can get idefix97 from aminet. With idefix97 installed, you'llbe able to access the full capacity. For the file system I use SmartFileSystem.

Weed

[Gulliver]

Well i actually dont use Extractmodule, which i find a bit confusing to use, i prefer romsplit, which is for the technically inclined, so i suggest you give it a shot.

find it at http://www.doobreynet.co.uk/beta/index.html

I have full support with my patched scsi.device for my 500GB disk! However i have it splitted into five partitions: 4GB, 121GB, 125GB, 125GB and 125GB

[EchsBachs]

Heh, I am defiantly not technically inclined, but thanks everyone for your advice.

What's interesting is now I threw in an 80gig IDE drive, and HDtoolbox sees it as 74.5gig (which is fine). But when I go to make my partitions, it shows a max hard drive size of 27gigs...

Very strange?

Also I did install IDEfix, same deal.

Would getting a 3rd party IDE adapter just solve all this?

[Bamiga2002]

Would getting a 3rd party IDE adapter just solve all this?

Yes, get a Fast-ATA 4000 and never think of large HD problems anymore.

[pan1k]

Well, he could get a mp3 decoder, and store a lot of mp3s... ;-)

[Thomas]

Would getting a 3rd party IDE adapter just solve all this?

No, it won't. It's a bug of HDToolbox which is independant of the controller.

Check the drive's label. There should be something like "LBA" or "user sectors" printed on it with a very large number. For an 80 GB drive it should be around 156,250,000.

In HDToolbox go to "initialize drive" and increase the number of cylinders until the "total number of blocks" matches the LBA value.

Bye,
Thomas

[haywirepc]

This whole thread is like an ad for an ide controller and cf card solution!

Steven