Amiga 1200 Harddrive limitations

[stevil2k]

Hi all,

I am planning on digging out my old Amiga1200 and putting a new harddrive in. I have a couple of spare 3.5" drives lying around and the Amiga is equipped to take such a drive.

My question is, what is the maximum size drive I can use? I seem to remember there is a limit. I got an 8GB drive from an XBox and a 20GB drive lying around.

Thanks for your help, nice to see people wanting to keep such an amazing platform alive.

Stevil©

[Daedalus]

Hi Stevil2k!
    The limit on what hard drive you can use in the A1200 is dependant on the version of the OS you're using. If it's bog-standard with Kickstart 3.0 the limit is 4.3GB, if it's Kickstart 3.1 nad OS 3.9 it's, well, big enough for you. Don't know what the limit is but I've got a 120GB drive on mine and it's working no problem. If you wanted, you can use a different filesystem though and this will solve the problem to a certain extent. SFS is free, but you'll need to be reasonably competent with HDToolbox etc. In all cases anyway you'll have to keep your system partition entirely below the 2GB mark, as the OS needs to use this to load the updated versions of (or patches to) scsi.device you'll need...

[Daedalus]

P.S., Welcome to Amiga.org!! :-)

[Thomas]

You can connect any size you want, they will all work. But without new drivers you cannot use more than the first 4GB of the drive. With new drivers you can use the first 128GB of the drive. AFAIK there is no LBA48 driver for the internal IDE bus.

"New drivers" means either IDEfix97 or AmigaOS 3.5 or 3.9.

Things are completely different if you use a third-party IDE controller like the FastATA/Powerflyer or similar.

Bye,
Thomas

[stevil2k]

Thanks for the advice.

Am I right in thinking that I could partition the drive? say perhaps split the 8GB drive into 2 + 3 + 3GB Fast File System partitions? or is it a hardware limitation?

I seem to remember that the amiga currently has a 4GB drive in it already.

Thanks for welcoming to the forums have used amigas for the last 15+ years, emulation is fun but its just not the same.

[Daedalus]

It's a limitation of scsi.device, the software driver of the IDE drive... Splitting the drive like that won't work, purely as the driver can only address a 32-bit space on the drive. With an updated scsi.device you will be able to use more of the drives either by using a newer version of FFS or by using SFS. To upgrade to OS3.9, don't forget that you'll have to update the ROMs as well to version 3.1...

[stevil2k]

Thats what I was thinking, I will look into IDEFix97 see if that helps, If not I have seen a ROM upgrade pack about that I could buy.

Thanks for your help.

Stevil

[leirbag28]

 I have used IDEFix 97 many times......have NEVER been able to read HD's greater than 4gig with it..am I doing something wrong?  Does it need to be the Full Registered version?  the ones I used came on CU Amiga CD's

[stevil2k]

leirbag28:

i just found this in the docs for IDEFix97

"Restrictions of unregistered version: Nag requesters, otherwise full functional."

When I get the rest of my Amiga back I will be testing it and will let you know if it works.

I think you also need a different filesystem for the drive like SFS mentioned by Daedalus

http://www.xs4all.nl/~hjohn/SFS/download.htm

I am looking forward to experimenting with it all (spoken like a true amiga geek)

[JLF65]

I've got a 20GB 2.5" hdd in my A1200. It needs the boot partition to be less than 4G in size, and under the 4G point on the drive (I made it the first partition and 2G). After 3.5 boots, it puts in place a kicktag with the updated scsi.device driver that handles larger drives, so all remaining partitions can be any size and anywhere on the drive. This issue is similar to older PowerMacs trying to use larger drives and HFS+.