5Gb HDD in A1200, not validated?

[seb835]

Hello,

Im trying to format an old Fuji 5gig hard drive in my desktop A1200. Im using kickstart 3.1 and the install disk of workbench 3.1.

I can partition the drive using HDToolBox from the disk into a 30 meg partition for "Workbench", a 3.9 gig partition for "Work", and the rest as a third partition since it doesnt seem to like displaying anything over 4 gig.

So this is fine, I press "Save Changes to Drive" then reboot. But then when I run "HD Setup" from the 3.1 install disk, it always comes up as "HD1 not a valid DOS disk". If I try formatting this partition using the standard workbench "Icons>Format Disk", it then says "Drive is not validated".

Ive tried lots of different partitions with different sizes but nothing seems to work...can anyone help me at this point please?

Many thanks indeed.
Seb

[amigagr]

for start make a 250mb boot partition. after that you have format it and installed workbench3.1 use these patches so the amiga os be cabable of handling more than 4gb hard disks:
td64
nsdpatch (temporaly the aminet is of, search for it later)
or you can use sfs instead of ffs.

-edit-
nsdpatch from makecd site

[Thomas]

or you can use sfs instead of ffs

That's not true. Only very old versions of SFS support large HDDs without a patch for the IDE driver. So you need NSDPatch *and* SFS.

The same is true for NSDPatch alone. It does not work with an unpatched FFS.

IMHO it's not worth all the hassle with these patches for just 1GB. Just leave the upper 1GB of the drive empty (without partitions) and you are fine. You could use the space for Linux or NetBSD or similar.

Bye,
Thomas

[amigagr]

@Thomas: you are right about sfs, i mean this but probably its not so obvius

-edit-
nsdpatch

[alexh]

Just out of curiosity what is the difference between using say IDEFix97 and NSDPatch?

Someone once told me that NSD was flawed by design.

[Thomas]

IDEfix is a real replacement for the internal IDE driver (scsi.device) which gives real support for 64bit commands. NSDPatch only gives 64bit-command to SCSI-command translation, using the original driver with all its bugs. This allows you to use only HDDs up to 8GB, not more (due to driver bugs).

But that's not the reason why people don't like NSD. A full implementation of NSD would also give real 64bit support (in fact IDEfix does implement both TD64 and NSD).

There is a collection of articles about why NSD is bad on the bottom of Ralph Babel's home page: http://babel.org/amiga/

Bye,
Thomas