Howmuch can OFS handle under kickstart 1.3 ???

[Effy]

It´s a question from one of our belgian clubmembers that I can not answer. He has got an A500 with kick 1.3 and wants to format a 9 Gb scsi hd. After a lot of trying and bad language he decided to cry for help and after a long series of postings he said he used FFS to format the hd. Of course FFS is not supported by 1.3, only OFS. But hasn´t OFS got a limit of hd space that can be used I have really no experience at this point but I really would like to help this guy !!!

[Thomas]

OFS has a disk size limit of 8MB.

But when he says he uses FFS then he does. FFS comes with WB 1.3 on floppy disk. It is not in the Kickstart ROM and thus cannot be used with floppy disks. But it can be installed into the RDB and used for HDD partitions.

I don't know the limitation of the old FFS but you should not expect to be able to use more than 500MB or so with an A500 controller anyway.

Even with a decent controller and a non-limited FFS, you cannot access more than the first 4GB of the HDD. With the old versions there might be a 2GB limit either.

Please note that it is not a partitions size limit but a *disk* size limit. You can access the first 4GB resp. 2GB of the disk. If you create partitions past the limit, accesses to those partitions will destroy the data on the first partitions.

So suggest your club member to create one 100MB partition in the beginning of the drive and try to format it. If it works, be happy. Create one 100MB partition after another until one fails to format. This partition and the rest of the HDD should remain unused.

Now that you know the maximum disk size, you can delete the 100MB partitions and create one or two partitions as you like within the limit.

Bye,
Thomas

[Noster]

Hi,

I don't know the disk-size-limit of FFS from WB 1.3, but the maximum size of a single partition is 2GB. I think the maximum size of a disk is much larger, cause the disk is addressed in blocks of 512 byte and the Amiga is able to address upto 2 billion of these blocks.
I would try to split the hd into partitions of less than 2GB, that should work.

Noster

[Piru]

@Noster

I think the maximum size of a disk is much larger, cause the disk is addressed in blocks of 512 byte and the Amiga is able to address upto 2 billion of these blocks. I would try to split the hd into partitions of less than 2GB, that should work.

...But this only applies when using TD64, NSD or DirectSCSI. None of these is available for KS 1.3.

Do not try to use >4GB (or 2GB, as the old filesystems and devices migth have had sign issues) with KS 1.3, all you get is dataloss.

[Effy]

Just got mail back when suggesting to format the hd with the format function on a Workbench 1.3 floppy. Seems there´s no icon of an unformatted hd ?! Under 2.0 you have HDttolbox, but what do you have under 1.3

[Thomas]

Under 2.0 you have HDttolbox, but what do you have under 1.3

If the controller is RDB-compatible you can use HDInstTool (see Aminet) which is delivered with most RDB-compatible controllers anyway.

If it is not RDB-compatible (which most old controllers weren't) you have to use the software which came with it. If this software is no longer available, bad luck.

Bye,
Thomas

[Effy]

Think it´s that Evolution.device ... had some experience with that in the past but that was under 2.0 and 3.1 ...

[itix]

OFS has a disk size limit of 8MB.

I thought limit was 32MB? But maybe I remember wrong... OFS was still used on Amiga harddisks on early days and 8MB sounds too small...

[BenT]

When I am messing around with OFS I usually keep them at maximum 80Mb..usually bigger partitions will mess up (at least for me).
It is possible to use FFS with 1.3 and if you have an installationdisk that came with your harddiskcontroller it will fix it for you, else it is some extra work for you... but it works. Read the 1.3 dos manual and it will explain some of the things you have to do.

Bent