1200 Hard Drve & Roms Question

[Seb_Oz]

Just joined this group so Hi All....I am an Amiga fan from way back but went to a PC some time ago now...a friend has just given me a 1200 with a 1 gig 2.5 hard drive and rom 3.0 .... now... the hard drive has packed up...(to long in the previous owners shed I guess) so what is the largest HD I can install without to much fuss and can I run os 3.1 on a 3.0 rom 1200 ... I have my A4000/040 OS on cd from years ago and would like to install that on the 1200 ... this 1200 has a separate case with an ide cdrom/floppy drive and the HD in....goes like the wind ...after all these years it still boots in around 10 secs (or it did until the HD went down) ... love my Amiga and will be keeping it for sure.....sorry to drool for so long....all the best .... Regards Seb (In luv agin)

[motorollin]

With a 3.0 ROM you would be best off with a hard drive of 4GB or less, or using a bigger drive and only using 4GB of it.

If you have an Amiga operating system on CD then it's probably 3.5 or 3.9, right? If so then you will need some more RAM in your Amiga before running it.

You can run 3.1 on 3.0 ROMs apparently (never tried it myself). If you want to go any higher than 3.1 then you do need the 3.1 ROM chips.

--
moto

[orange]

I'd suggest using pfs, and IIRC it doesn't matter if KS is 3.0 or 3.1 (except for startup delay)

[motorollin]

This is something I should really know the answer to, but do filesystems like PFS/SFS/AFS allow >4GB partitions even on OS<3.5? If so, what was changed in 3.5 to allow >4GB partitions? (I assume they updated scsi.device or fastfilesystem, but I'm not sure).

--
moto

[amigagr]

if you have install the nsdpatch for scsi.device you can use pfs/sfs/afs too.

[darksun9210]

fastfilesystem got patched to understand 64bit filesystems  a la NSD - New Style Devices. this was from version 45.1 onwards. i seem to remember using it with OS3.0 and a fourway IDE splitter on an A4000 with a 5.1Gb drive and it worked fine. (4.8Gb usable space)

fastfilesystem is brought up to version 45.9 with OS3.5/9 with a few of the bugs ironed out, but seems to need the 3.1 roms... this is just from personal expirience, as i upgraded my A4000 to KS3.1 with the 3.5 software, sold it, but kept a backup drive (the 5.1Gb now with v45.9FFS). bought an A1200 a little while later (KS3.0) thought the drive should at least be readable, ended up loosing the lot. *sigh* live and learn...  :roll:

[amigakit]

Welcome to Amiga.org

The easiest option for a hard disk would be an 4GB Hard Disk Drive

[Piru]

to patch scsi.device:
http://www.aminet.net/disk/misc/IDEfix97.lha
or
http://www.google.com/search?q=SCSI_IDE43_23.lha
http://www.aminet.net/util/sys/patchstrip.lha
...and some way of loading the new device, for example BlizKick.

FFS 40.x with TD64 support:
http://www.aminet.net/disk/misc/ffstd64.lha

...or PFS or SFS.

To make sure things work properly:
http://www.aminet.net/disk/misc/check4gb.lha

It is possible with KS 3.0, probably even with KS 2.0x (V37++). Tricky, but possible. If you want to play with it, make damn sure you try it with empty hdds first, filling with data and making sure no things b0rk. Also the boot partition must be below the 4GB limit, and you must make sure yourself that you don't access the >4GB area without the patches installed.

It worked on KS 3.0 for sure. Everyone claiming it's only possible with KS 3.1 (or WB 3.5/3.9) is wrong.

Since this is somewhat of a hack and some l33t hax0r skills are required: if you just want to be safe, use the first 4GB of your HDD. You can use larger drive, just only use the first 4GB of it.

[orange]

hmm, if reading file on a partiton beyond 4GB works fine, is it safe to assume that writing will be ok too?

[Thomas]

if reading file on a partiton beyond 4GB works fine, is it safe to assume that writing will be ok too

Depends on how the file got there. If the file was written on a system which was >4GB-ready for sure and you just put the HDD into your system, then yes, if you can successfully read it, then it is safe to write to the partition, too.

But if you wrote the file on the same system you try to read it on, then it could happen that the file was written into the area below 4GB (destroying data on other partitons) and now is read from there, too.

Bye,
Thomas

[Daedalus]

darksun9210 wrote:

fastfilesystem is brought up to version 45.9 with OS3.5/9 with a few of the bugs ironed out, but seems to need the 3.1 roms... this is just from personal expirience, as i upgraded my A4000 to KS3.1 with the 3.5 software, sold it, but kept a backup drive (the 5.1Gb now with v45.9FFS). bought an A1200 a little while later (KS3.0) thought the drive should at least be readable, ended up loosing the lot. *sigh* live and learn...  :roll:

I'd imagine that is because you used the version of FFS in the ROM Update or SetPatch parts, but didn't install it on the hard drive's RDB. Therefore when you went to try to read the v45.9 partitions on the 3.0 machine with version 39.whatever it couldn't understand it. With any filesystem installed on the RDB, it should be loaded on startup of the machine, allowing it to read the drive, but if it's not there it has to be provided from somewhere else... That's a shame you had to figure it out that way :-(

[Seb_Oz]

Thanx a lot ... you have all been most helpful...I have one more problem to trouble you with....that is....I have a ide cdrom that I am useing IDEfix97 with...the problem is that I cannot locate the full version anywhere on the net and the pop-ups are driving me nuts.....I will pay the full price plus postage to anyone who has it or can anyone direct me to where I can get it...or something simular that does the same job ....... I have heaps of Amiga CD software from my A4000 that I would like to use....thanx again guys for all your help.....Regards Seb ....!!!