4.3 gig HD recognised as wrong size

[dandelion]

Hi all...

Have just got hold of a Quantum Fireball 4.3 gig drive for my Amiga 4000 (Kickstart 3.0). After booting from the Install 3.0 disk and trying to Define the new drive type, it trys to tell me it's just 14.8 megs in size.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

dandelion

[Linchpin]

Isnt there a 4gig limit on 3.0 rom machines?

[pjhutch]

Yes, with the 32 bit Filesystem it can only read disks upto 4.29Gb (2^32). You need to replace the file system with one from OS 3.9 or get PFS or SFS instead.

[Linchpin]

Thought so. Cheers :-)

[Thomas]

Yes, but most hdds labeled as 4.3 gig actually are 4.0 gig (= 4.3 billion bytes).

@dandelion: on the hdd label or in the manual or on the manufacturer's homepage you should find the specifications of the drive, e.g. heads, sectors and cylinders. After clicking on "read configuration" in HDToolbox check that these values are correct. If not, correct them by hand.

Note that the exact values do not matter. Only the result of multiplying heads * sectors * cylinders, which gives the total number of blocks on the drive, should match. At least you should not configure more blocks than there actually exist. A 4gb drive has something about 8388608 blocks (4gb/512).

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

Well, according to this document the drive has 9 heads, 63 sectors and 14848 cylinders which leads to 8418816 blocks which is slightly above 4GB. As everything above 4GB cannot be addressed, you should use only  14794 cylinders.

Bye,
Thomas

[itix]

HDToolBox supports HDs only up to 4GB. If your HD is bigger than 4GB
your HD size is reported to be smaller than it actually is.

To use your HD you must throw some megs away. Decrease cylinders from
drive configuration until you have something like -3 megs available. I
had to do similar thing for my 4GB HD on my old A1200 (installing
patches for 10 megs is not worth of job).

[manicx]

I think there was a patch from Amiga to correct this limit error.

[Thomas]

Oh dear, why can't people read from the top before they give stupid answers ?

[Framiga]

@ itix

OS3.9 (OS3.5 not 100% sure) HDToolbox, has no limit in HD size.

HDInstTools, works fine too. Try to read the HD geometry with HDInstTools

HDInstTools

Ciao

 

[browny]

Had the same problem !.I was using the HDInstools on WB 3.1 and was telling me I had minus mb of ram, i tried reading the config and all the other methods, tacks, heads ,cylinders,and still the F++ker would not play ball.
Then I pulled an old Version of HDInstools(V4.2.one that i had with the HD upgrade for my old A500,
and bingo it read the config and recognised the 4+gig barrier no probs !.
Might be of some help.
Good luck

[manicx]

ftp://de.aminet.net/pub/aminet/disk/misc/ffstd64.lha

Fast File System TD64 patch=> patch for FFS to recognise partitions larger than 4GBs.

[Thomas]

This patch only works if the HDD driver (scsi.device in this case) does support TD64 either. It does not.

You can patch scsi.device either with IDEfix or OS3.9 but still the boot partition must reside below 4GB (because the patches are applied after power on).

In addition more than 4GB of space in a single partition will always cause problems with a variety of programs. Installer being one example, DirOpus another. These programs are not prepared to the fact that multiplying two 32bit numbers might give a result not fitting into 32 bits. This is no matter of drivers.

The easiest method to use a 4.3GB drive is to use only 4GB of it. You may think about patches for drives of 10GB or larger but for around 4GB this really does not make much sense.

Bye,
Thomas

[Framiga]

@all

IMHO you all are speaking about "partition size" but here there is a "HD size" problem.(that isn't the same thing)

I'm still suggest you to use HDInstTools from Aminet, make a small boot partition (200 MB or less) and other 3-4 partitions as well.

No partition size limit problems at all.

Ciao

[browny]

@Framiga, sounds good to me, the more partitions the better, who the f**k wants one partition with all the problems it brings .
Having said that if you use the the WB 3.1 HD installer it splits the HD into two partitions, but for some uknown reason they allocate just enough space to install the OS on the primary partition(sorry about the windoze plug!) so that if you should add any software you soon fill the F**ker up!.
What the hell was that all about !.