HD Size with Amiga?

[bon]

What is the max Hard Disk size one can use under Amiga OS (3.9) ?

[lempkee]

what ever u choose as long as u have a interface that can handle it...

i have 200gb....

on idefix 99 ...now i have fastata .. before all this i had scsi...no prob...

on the basic (slow) ide controller i dont know, but i think it doesnt matter really...havnt heard anyone complain anyway...

[shIva]

afaik 4g, otherwise you´ll need an nsd driver or sth. like sfs

look here

i use it and can say it works pretty good :-)

[Cyberus]

And here

Sorry I am too lazy to say more than this

[Vincent]

Absolutely anything at all.  Just make sure you have OS3.9's SetPatch running or you might get the wrong sizes.

I was using 3.5 to create partitions on my HD then installed OS3.9 and found out I was using half my HD and I'm pretty sure it was SetPatch - I cold booted OS3.9's floppy and got the full 20gig, but cold booting OS3.5's floppy gave me only 8gig.

[lempkee]

1 important thing is:

if u use a BIG disk... rember that boot partision must be in START of the disk (when u edit it in hdtoolbox) or else it wont boot the disk.

also your boot disk shouldnt be more than a gig or so (mine is 500megs) for many reasons...1 is..if u use FFS still....long validating times...

cheers

[Vincent]

The boot partition has to be under the 4 gig barrier, if you don't use FFS or don't mind the long validations you could have a boot partition of 4 gig.  Mine's sitting at 2.2gig just now :-D

[bon]

I have the following 2 problems. FYI I am using a hard disk with the A 1200's internal hard disk controller, and an external Hard Drive getting power from a PC PSU.

1. I installed at first a 15 GB drive which the Amiga found it was a 7.8 GB. I tried playing with the settings but no luck. So I partitioned it using only the space provided (DH0: 500 MB, and divided the rest to 2-3 partitions). Everything was ok, until I upgraded from OS 3.5 to OS 3.9. Then, whenever I booted I got read errors from all my partitions (except DH0). I supposed it was due to the hard disk's size...

2. I said "OK, I can live with smaller hard Drives as long as I do not have problems! So, I then Installed a smaller, 3.5 GB Hard Drive which worked fine until I installed OS 3.9! With OS 3.9, whenever I boot, I get messages of the type "Work has a read error" and I could do NOTHING about it! I cannot format it, as the format utility just freezes! When I swithch back to OS 3.5 (or 3.1) everything works smoothly! I also replaced the hard drive with another one, but the same OS 3.9 related error occured!

Any ideas?

Thanx in advance... :-P

[Vincent]

bon wrote:

1. I installed at first a 15 GB drive which the Amiga found it was a 7.8 GB. I tried playing with the settings but no luck. So I partitioned it using only the space provided (DH0: 500 MB, and divided the rest to 2-3 partitions). Everything was ok, until I upgraded from OS 3.5 to OS 3.9. Then, whenever I booted I got read errors from all my partitions (except DH0). I supposed it was due to the hard disk's size...

I think that's because OS3.9 sees the HD as 15gig, but it's fooled into thinking it's only 7.5gig.  This 7.5gig is due to SetPatch (I think).  The read errors are possibly due to the A1200 onboard HD controller.  I have an IDEfix97 4-way buffer and haven't encountered that problem when my 20gig was formatted for 8gig - so I could be wrong with that.

I have no idea why the 3.5gig HD didn't work.  Perhaps you could try formatting/partitioning in 3.5 getting it totally setup then switch to 3.9.  Or how about trying the "HD Reselection" if that's still avaliable in 3.5 and 3.9 (I know it's in 3.1)

[Kurt]

SFS is free and PFS cost money but both work great.No invalidated disk drives and is way faster than FFS. 3 tetrabytes limit I think and hard drive partitions have a 110 gig limit.
a Fool and his data are soon separated with FFS.

NO good reason other than you like losing data and invalidated harddrives to be using FFS.

Kurt

 

[steidley]

I installed an 80Gig HD.  I thought it was going to work just fine... Then I did a full format.  Not the Quick, wich I have since read in a couple of places is the way to do it.  Now the drive doesn't work.

Any ideas as to a fix?

[Russ]

Never use full format, it is a 32 bit command it doesn't understand track disk 64.
Use quick format also modern drives do not use full formats.
I am using a 120Gig, 40 Gig, and a couple of smaller drives scsi and ide.

[Russ]

It is 2 to 4 Terabites. More then we will need right now.
OS 3.1 and below had a 4 Gig limit with 2 Gig partitions.

[Piru]

The limit is 2 terabytes, if the block size is 512 bytes.

Both pfs and sfs use ULONG (32bit unsigned integer) for block numbers.

So this sceme can address maximum 2^32 blocks, 512 bytes each, total 2 terabytes.

[bon]

So you suggest I just use SFS? But how you explain the read errors I got ONLY from OS 3.9 and not 3.5 or previous??? Is it because of the A1200's IDE Interface?