PARTITIONING LARGE HARD DRIVES

[Darrin]

I have two 80GB hard drives installed in my A4000 attached to a FastATA4000 controller.  I partitioned and formated the first drive using the FastATA's "split" mode which broke the drives up into 17 x 4GB units.  I'd like to partition the other drive as 2 x 40GB units with split mode off using SFS (which is installed in L:), but what can I use to partition the drive?

HardDriveToolbox comes up with complete bollocks when it tries to read the drive configuration and I've tried feeding it data from the manufacturer's website (It's a Barracuda 7200.7 80GB drive model ST380011A).

Is there an updated toolbox available?  I can't find anything on Aminet and I really don't want another 17 drives cluttering up my Workbench.

Cheers.

[arnljot]

The one with amikit worked for me, but not until setpatch had run. I think its whats needed, because the system had to be fully booted.

I used it on a drive which was completely under winuae control. The same hdtoolbox worked on the real amiga too. The "drive" was a 16gb flash.

[rkauer]

 Thomas (from here) write a small (but extremely good) program to read HD configuration called fixhdsize.

 It reads the HD firmware to correct the values in HDToolBox.

[Darrin]

Cheers guys.  I'll try that software later and if that fails then I'll try hooking up the drive to my PC and see if WinUAE will manage it.

I appreciate the help.

Darrin

[Darrin]

OK, a quick update.  I managed to partition the 80GB drive using the OS3.9 Emergency Boot Disk.

I had a OS3.1 system set up (with the Deneb, FastATA and Cybervision 643D) and my mistake was to try and partition the other large drive BEFORE installing OS3.9.

I made the EBD (Emergency Boot Disk), rebooted the system from that with the OS3.9 CD inserted and the EBD HardDriveToolbox managed to sort the drive out.  It still didn't read the drive configuration correctly (It thought it was a 27GB drive), but once I entered the correct number of cylinders, heads and blocks per track it did the rest.  On the partition screen it divided the drive up into several FFS partitions by default, but I quickly deleted them and made two equal partitions using SFS.  A quick format and another reboot using the EBD and I installed OS3.9 from the CD to the fiest 40GB partition.  OS3.9 also copied over my FastATA prefs and my Cybergraphx setting so it booted up into a nice 1024x768 display.

Now I can reformat the original hard drive with the 17 partitions and turn that into 2 more large partitions to back up the other drive.

Then it's reinstall Deneb and see if I can get my USB ethernet card to work.  I tested it under the OS3.1 installation and the Deneb identified and mounted it so hopefully I'll be posting from AWeb shortly.

Wish me luck!

[arnljot]

Correct me if I´m wrong, but isn´t it so that an Amiga boot partition can´t be bigger than 2GB, but that other partitions can happily be bigger provided the needed patches and filesystem?

[Darrin]

arnljot wrote:
Correct me if I´m wrong, but isn´t it so that an Amiga boot partition can´t be bigger than 2GB, but that other partitions can happily be bigger provided the needed patches and filesystem?

That might be the case if you're booting from standard IDE connectors on the motherboard, but I'm using the Elbox FastATA4000 in a Zorro3 slot and it is quite happy booting from my SDH1: 40GB partition (connected as the slave drive on the secondary port).

I've just installed BB1.  I'll install BB2 and get the Network software installed and then get the Deneb working.

[hardlink]

Next step - how do you clone big Amiga hard drives, RDB, partitions, and all?

On Unix, you could use the command 'dd'. Do any of the backup utilities do this?

[Thomas]

I've just installed BB1. I'll install BB2 and get the Network software installed and then get the Deneb working.

You should first install Genesis and then BB1. That's because without BB1 GenesisPrefs needs MUI and BB1 delivers a new version of GenesisPrefs, but only if Genesis is already installed.

Bye,
Thomas

[orange]

@hardlink
there is dd for amiga on aminet, dunno if it works with large drives though.. maybe Quarterback does?

[hardlink]

orange wrote:
@hardlink
there is dd for amiga on aminet, dunno if it works with large drives though.. maybe Quarterback does?

I guess I'll let you know
I have just about finished setting up a 40G drive, now I need to clone it to 4 other identical drives. I don't want to go through the drill of HDToolbox, etc, for all of them, and was hoping someone else had done this recently. I'll try the dd first, although it's not too 'Amiga'.

[orange]

its a bit hard to find it on aminet, its in bffs.lha archive and named dcp instead of dd

[Darrin]

Thomas wrote:]

You should first install Genesis and then BB1. That's because without BB1 GenesisPrefs needs MUI and BB1 delivers a new version of GenesisPrefs, but only if Genesis is already installed.

Bye,
Thomas

Ah, drat!  Never mind, I had to install MUI anyway for the Deneb card otherwise you can't access Trident.