My harddisk use my fastmem?

[PG]

Hi,
i have a problem i dont understand, with my amiga 1200.
I use workbench 3.0 and an internal 2.5" 2.1Gb Toshiba hard disk.
I also have a 4Mb Fastmem expansion.
Now, if i use the original Install disk to setup the drive, everythings fine.
If i try another install disk not made by commodore, my hard disk use nearly all my fast mem..?
Does anyone know why this happen?
I would like to have more than two partitions, thats why i dont want to use the original install disk.
Thanks in advance for all help! :-)

[SilvrDrgn]

For caching a minimal amount of information, AmigaOS uses what is called "buffers" on all forms of disks - floppies and hard drives.  A certain number of them, which is adjustable, are allocated during bootup.  There are two possibilities for your problem:

1) The hard drive has a lot of buffers configured via the respective parameter in the RDB.  Use HDToolBox to reduce that buffers number for each partition.  This is not likely in your case because the amount of memory in use changes when you use different install disks.

2) The non-Commodore install disk is using the "AddBuffers" command to add a large amount of buffers to the hard disk device name.  On that install disk, check the S/startup-sequence file or the S/user-startup file for the "AddBuffers" command.  Reduce the number after it to reduce the amount of memory that's used by the HD.

[PG]

Hi Michael,

many thanks for your help!
I started with checking the buffer size for each partition.
If i use HDsetup on the original Install disk both partitions buffer size became 30.
But if i partition the drive with the non-Commodore disk, (using HDInstallTools) all partions buffer size are over 3000 as default!
I lowered them to 30 and my fastmem is back!:-)
Do you have any recommendations how high i should set the buffer size for each partion?
Is the disk read/write faster with a higher buffer size?

Thanks again.
Per-Gunnar

[Matt_H]

I've got my partitions set to 300 buffers.

[PG]

Hi Matt!

Thanks for your recommendation, ill try that.:-)