Hard drive problems?

[phill25]

I had recently bought a 20Gb Fujistu hard drive from Ebay.  I got it, installed it into the Amiga and went through the usual setup with HDtoolBox and so on.

I did a low level format to get rid of anything that was there.  I then did a verify data command and that came back clean.  Ideal I thought.

I then went on to install Workbench 3.1 and a few other programs (Magic WB, Tools Daemon etc) and then some games.
To my horror after a few long hours of finally getting it stored (or so I thought) it started coming up with checksum errors.  I then proceeded to HDToolbox to do the verfication again and that came back fine.  This happened a few more times before I had enough and put back the old drive in and installed that with my games and its hopefully, running 100% ok now

Can anyone explain to me what I was doing wrong with the other drive to give me Checksum errors on it?  I was making sure the drive wasnt being accessed (written or read from) and generally treated it as I had done my older one (the one that is back installed into the 1200)

Can anyone help me make sense of this please, cos I was nearly at the stage of throwing the drive out the window!!  :crazy:

Many thanks for help in advance

[motorollin]

What size was the partition you created?

--
moto

[phill25]

I created a number of partitions, all less than 4000Mb.  I think they where along the lines of 500Mb, 1500Mb etc, something around that size.

Was it the size that was causing me an issue as out of the 20Gb drive I was able to 'see' 8Gb of it through Workbench 3.1

[motorollin]

Size of the disk doesn't matter. The first partition needs to be less than 2GB. All other partitions must be below 4GB. To be safe, make them less than 3.5GB just in case you have miscalculated the sizes and have gone over the 4GB barrier.

The alternative would be to have a 500GB boot partition, then install IDEfix and SFS. You can then create partitions as big as you like, larger than 4GB each and above he 4GB barrier.

--
moto

[phill25]

I was using HDToolbox to partition the drive and just going by what it was saying ie 4000Mb for example..

When I have installed the smaller drive I will plug in the bigger one and see whether or not I can get it to work properly.

Do you think that is all thats the problem with it?  I just need to install the software and it should work fine?  Would I then be able to see the full 20Gb size drive?

[motorollin]

Don't trust HDToolBox's recommendations. It was written before hard drives larger then 4GB existed, so it won't handle them safely (in other words, you can't trust it not to create partitions larger than your Amiga can handle). So to be safe, you should manually make sure your partitions are well below the 4GB limit.

But yes, once you have installed IDEfix and created your partitions with SFS you can access the whole 20GB disk (but your boot partition still needs to be within the first 2GB).

Edit - also note that the 4GB limit is not 4GB per partition, it is 4GB in total.

--
moto

[phill25]

Many thanks for the help Moto, I'll have another look at it and see what happens when I install the software  Hopefully it'll fit on a floppy disk so I dont have to try and get the network to work again!!  It seems a bit tempermental

[motorollin]

You're welcome :-) SFS and IDEfix are over 400k each, so will fit separately on to an MS-DOS formatted floppy disk for transfer to your Amiga. Here is the sequence of what you need to do:

1. Create ~500MB Workbench partition
2. Install Workbench on that partition
3. Install IDEfix
4. Install SFS (follow the instructions in the guide very carefully)
5. Create the remaining partitions, being sure to use SFS when you create them

--
moto

[phill25]

Its very appreaitive for the help, a thank you is the least I can do

I assume I'll be alright to create the first partition with HDToolbox and then carry it on from there?

I'm just looking around for a price for a Zorro graphics card for that 1200 Tower...  I dont have the money, but its just too tempting to not try and get it! :-D

[motorollin]

You will be using HDToolBox to create all of the partitions, so no problem there. The difference is that once you have IDEfix installed and are using SFS as the filesystem for the partitions, they will make it safe to use the entire disk.

As for buying additional bits and pieces, well it's fun to upgrade Amigas for the sake of it :-) Take a look at my sig; I don't *need* that A4000. I use it for retro gaming. But it is fun to tinker around with the hardware and see how far you can push it! That's part of the Amiga experience.

--
moto

[phill25]

I hope that drive works then because its a fair bit quicker than the one I have currently got installed.

I keep telling myself that when I purchased my QX9650 CPU the other week!! :lol:  I certainly dont need it, but a quad core running at 4Ghz (each core mind you..) under water cooling...  What the hell!  Oh SLI graphics as well..  I must be mad!! :lol:

[phill25]

I was just wondering if you could help me?

I dont think I have installed IDEFix or SFS correctly, as I've found a program that apparently checks drives to see whether or not they can be used and are bigger than 4Gb and so far its coming up no
I can select the SFS file system when I try to make a partition, but its not allowing me to view the hole 20Gb of space.  I'm still limited to the 8Gb I could orignally see

I really dont know what I'm doing!!   :crazy:  Also I have found out (after a few wrong mistypes in the Amiga dos bit) that I have fastfilesystem 40.12 or something..  I was wondering if this made any difference?
Please help!!

[Thomas]

I dont think I have installed IDEFix or SFS correctly, as I've found a program that apparently checks drives to see whether or not they can be used and are bigger than 4Gb and so far its coming up no

I guess you are referring to Check4GB. Please post its output here. Then we can see if IDEfix is installed correctly or not.

Do you have a registration key for IDEfix ? If not you should get a nag requester every now and then.

I can select the SFS file system when I try to make a partition, but its not allowing me to view the hole 20Gb of space. I'm still limited to the 8Gb I could orignally see

Try FixHDDSize.

Bye,
Thomas

[phill25]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for replying  I dont think I have a code for IDEFix but I did find some disks when I was searching through my collection of Amiga stuff, so I'll have a look and see what they where.

I will attach a screen shot, I hope it comes out alright with the camera as 9/10 there's a line going through the shot!!

I have also downloaded FixHDDSize so I will try that as well and post results  

Thanks again

[phill25]

I have downloaded and installed FixHDDSize and its not working perfectly

Thank you very much for your help Thomas  Also have the partitions sorted with SFS and I've now partitioned most of the drive

Who ever said I'd never need 20Gb of HD space on an Amiga!!  :lol: