Size of directory hard disk

[b41d3r]

Hi,

It seems that my winuae gives an arbitrary size to my directory hard disk. I mean directories mounted as hard drives in winuae.
Personnally, I don't mind but some softwares complain about it like wordworth. It considers the space size as  too low for it  to install.
Is there a way to tweak this measurement  so that I can install hungry softwares ?

[Thomas]

The calculation is like this:

- divide the total amount of free space of your harddrive by 4GB. If the remainder of this calculation is bigger than 2GB, then your "hungry softwares" thing it's too small (a.k.a. negative).

Tweak:

- fill the harddisk with garbage files until the remainder is smaller than 2GB.

[b41d3r]

Thanks,
I suppose this means that winuae misses something in its management.
I hope it will be corrected like giving the possibility of a quota to comply with the rule you said.
This said, it's a little strange ...

[Zac67]

It's a classic bug: instead of reporting 2^31-1 for anything larger, it truncates the higher bits (and 0xFFFFFFFF) and treats the rest as signed (!) 32 bit. I guess the latter is AmigaOS' fault, but UAE's file system driver should know about this.

[Thomas]

Disk size is given as number of blocks and block size. WinUAE does this correctly. The Amiga software fails in calculating the size in bytes because it uses 32bit integers (some programs even use signed integers).

The same happens when you connect a big harddrive to a real Amiga, too. If you don't want this problem, make smaller partitions or fill the big partitions with data until less than 2 GB space is left. Or use Amiga software which can deal with big disks. If you replace the old installer used by WW by the one which comes with OS 3.9, the installation will work correctly.

BTW, this happens with old Windows software, too. For example Need For Speed III refuses to save to a partition which has more than 2GB free space.

[Daedalus]

Yep, it's a "feature" of the classic Amiga OS, and it's also possible that Wordworth is doing its own internal calculations in the same way, meaning that even a patch for the OS wouldn't solve the problem. Usually it's perfectly safe and harmless once the filesystem itself knows the correct size, but sometimes (like in this case) it causes issues.

Another alternative might be to create a hard disc file for WinUAE which is less than 2GB in size. You can install what you like there and keep it, or even install it and copy it over to wherever you like, and update the assigns etc. to suit.

[b41d3r]

Thanks all,
yes daedalus, this is the solution I consider the most reasonable.
And it'll be the occasion to struggle with this new topic !
Have I to use special tools to handler hard disk file like formatter, partitioner, ... ?

[Daedalus]

No, once you create it in WinUAE, you just need to format it from Workbench the normal way: Select the icon (should be a non-DOS volume), and choose Icon->Format... in the Workbench menus.