300Gig SCSCI Hard drive Install Question - A2000

[pneron]

Dear Amiga Colleagues

I am in the process of adding a new SCSI HD to my A2000 and thought this would be an easy process. I purchased a new SCSI 300Gig drive and  assumed I could prep/format this drive with the HDToolbox. However, I am not sure how to prep the config file for such a drive (assuming I can even use such capacity). Any ideas how I can get this drive to work?

The drive specs are below:

Cheetah 10K.7 SCSI ST3300007LW/LC


Drive capacity 300.0 GByte (formatted, rounded off values)
Read/write heads 8
Bytes/track 556 (average, rounded off values)
Bytes/surface 50.5 Gbytes (unformatted, rounded off values)
Tracks/surface (total) 90,774 Tracks (user accessible)
Tracks/inch 105,000 TPI
Peak bits/inch 658 KBPI
Internal data rate 470 - 944 Mbits/sec (variable with zone)
Disc rotational speed 10,000 r/min
Average rotational latency 3.00 msec

Current Specs:
===========
A2000
WB 3.1, - 40.42
Kickstart -40.63
Picasso II
Blizzard 68060 SCSI-II DMA Controller 68060 @ 50 MHz
3x AD516 Sunrize
Hydra Ethernet Card

[SnkBitten]

Not exactly identical as I'm IDE and using OS 3.9.

I'm using a 250 GB IDE drive on my A4000.  It required an updated scsi.device (or IDEfix97) driver, updated HDToolBox and an updated filesystem.

I'm using IDEfix97, OS 3.9 w/BoingBags 1 & 2 and PFS3 filesystem.  I still had to work in the limits of booting and 3.1 ROMs only able to see 4 GB drives.

1st partition is 3.5 GB (PFS3) and then I have an 8 GB work, 25 GB Misc and 25 GB Data (all these are PFS3 as well).  The rest of the space is not partitioned currently.

If the driver for the Blizzard controller supports larger partitions then it's just having the very first one meeting the 3.1 boot limitation of 4 GB.

I actually used WinUAE and attached my drive to that PC where I already had a patched and updated system to prep the drive, then created a new WinUAE setup to install the OS (corrupted Install 3.1 floppy disk so used .adf files thinking it was a bad floppy drive).

1st partition under 4 GB
Controller support large partitions
File system support for larger partitions

[Acill]

If you are using it to install Workbench you will want to create several partitions. I dont remember if the A2000 blizzard is wide SCSI, but if it is you will need to select the bliz scsi.device and be sure wide is checked in HD Tool Box. Once it shows up Create a 3.9GB partition and a few other larger ones however you feel they should be. If it were me I would just split it into a few equal ones and name them for what I plan to put on them. Apps, Utilities or simply Work1, Work2...

Click save when done and reboot. You should see it as a non formatted drive once WB come back up, format them and your good to go.

[utri007]

Would Phase5 scsi tools disk make this easier?

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/blizzard2060

[amiadudeorwat]

It looks like it detecting usable values in HDToolbox so that should be alright.

Next problem is the 8GB Limit or 4GB per partition of 3.1 FFS.  You can fix that by using PFS-AIO or SFS.  If it does happen to detect the correct size under 3.1 then all you should need to do is set it up with SFS or PFS.  Maybe install NSDPatch, sorry I don't have the details of this I have never tried setting up a large drive in 3.1.  

Here's a pretty good overview that should help you a bit, but it's for setting it up with ClassicWB and scsi.device, though most of the same fixes apply:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=32256

[pneron]

OK...will look into this option - thanks

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

My .02 cents, you're making this a lot harder for yourself than it needs to be if you stick with 3.1.

3.9 + the BB updates + PFS3-AIO is the way to go if you want large hard drive support.  

[Thomas]

There is nothing wrong with 3.1 using SCSI. OS 3.9 does not offer any benefit for non-Commodore SCSI controllers. PFS3-AIO will work with 3.1 as well.

There is no 8 GB limit in SCSI. This is an IDE issue.

And there is no 4 GB partition size limit. There is a 4 GB hard drive size limit which needs to be taken care of.

PFS3 in all its variants will work well with Phase5 SCSI controllers. No other patch needed. Boot partitions anywhere and as big as you like.
Note that PFS3 has a 100 GB partition size limit.

300 GB is quite a big thing for AmigaOS, though. In HDToolbox of 3.1 the display will probably screw up completely. You'll have to enable advanced options and enter cylinder numbers into the input fields.

Phase5 SCSI tools will probably do it better (it does not have a diagram which could be screwed up )

[pneron]

thank you for this info

[pneron]

Thanks Mike

[pneron]

OK, I will attempt to update the OS to 3.9 but have some basic NewBie HD questions:

I have the latest 3.9 CD but do not have enough space of my BOOT drive  - DH0: - to install 3.9 OS . I do have 2 other SCSI drives (DH1, DH2) in my A2000 that I can use but not sure how to make them Active after I install the OS? Is is just a question of installing the 3.9 on one of these drives and than using the the Amiga Early Startup Control Screen  to select new "Boot Options"? ( rebooting your Amiga while holding down both mouse buttons.)?

Not sure of the actual workflow for getting one of these drives to work as a new BOOT drive.

Thanks

[pneron]

any thoughts on my last post guys?

[amiadudeorwat]

If you want to make a different partition bootable, just open HDtoolbox and under boot priority, just make that number higher than the partition you are currently booting from is.  If your DH0: drive is boot priority 1, set DH2: boot priority to 2 and it will attempt to boot from that instead.  If you open the early startup menu, yes you can just pick a different drive to boot from and override that.  Keep in mind if you set it higher than 5, I think, then it will always boot from the HDD and not from floppy.  Again, you can override this with the early startup menu.

[QuikSanz]

any thoughts on my last post guys?

System should be sufficient at 500 MB and hold every patch in the world. Make everything else as you like, work, games, storage, etc.

[Thomas]

OK, I will attempt to update the OS to 3.9 but have some basic NewBie HD questions:

I have the latest 3.9 CD but do not have enough space of my BOOT drive  - DH0: - to install 3.9 OS . I do have 2 other SCSI drives (DH1, DH2) in my A2000 that I can use but not sure how to make them Active after I install the OS? Is is just a question of installing the 3.9 on one of these drives and than using the the Amiga Early Startup Control Screen  to select new "Boot Options"? ( rebooting your Amiga while holding down both mouse buttons.)?

Not sure of the actual workflow for getting one of these drives to work as a new BOOT drive.

Thanks

There is no "active" partition on AmigaOS. You can make any number of bootable partitions. The "bootable" flag is set or reset for each partition in HDToolbox. HDtoolbox also lets you set a boot priority for each bootable partition.

Which bootable partition will be "the" boot partition is derived from the boot priorities. The partition in the system (from all hard drives) which has the highest priority (the highest value) will be it. This way you can even put your primary boot partition on the last harddrive on the SCSI chain. It does not matter where it is as long as it has the highest priority.

If you have multiple partitions with the same priority, the one which comes first in the list is used. (The list in the early startup menu.)

Be aware that floppy drives have boot priorities, too. IIRC DF0 has prio 10. So if you set your harddrive's prio to 11 or higher, you won't be able to boot from floppy any more (unless you remove the harddrive or change its boot prio or use the early startup menu).

Changes in the early startup menu are only temporary. They don't even survive the OS 3.9 ROM update. This means if you want to boot OS 3.9 from another partition, you have to select it twice. After selecting it the first time hold down both mouse buttons immediately again and select it a second time. If you don't do this, then only the ROM update is loaded and then the normal boot partition is used.