Setting up large hard drive question

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AmiBayer
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I have a nice sata 120gb hard drive in my Amiga (using a sata to pata adapter works great). I have setup the first partition for Workbench of 2gb and have installed SFS on the RDB (all partitions will use SFS). I would like to use the rest of the drive to make some big partitions (bigger the better as I want the least amount of partitions using the most space possible).

What do I need to do so that applications such as Opus, HDToolbox and even Workbench windows display the correct available drive space? I'm reading I have to use a patched scsi.device file but is that all that needs to be done? The way i'm reading you simply take a patched scsi.device and copy it to devs but that sounds too simple to be all that is needed?

So can someone point me in the correct direction for stable big partitions and the correct reporting of drive space please?
 
Hello,

you need:

- new scsi.device to manage large harddisk (IDEFIX has the right one);
- a filesystem that can write/read over the 4GB (32bit) limit (PFS3);
- the NSD (new style device) package;

then you can try to setup your harddisk, but in this forum there is people that can give you a better reply!

Regards
Stefano
 
Are you using Classic Workbench? If so indeed you only need to copy the patched scsi device to devs and you're all set, CWB takes care of the rest (y)

If not then you need to use 'Loadmodule' to load up the patched scsi device.
 
Are you using Classic Workbench? If so indeed you only need to copy the patched scsi device to devs and you're all set, CWB takes care of the rest (y)

If not then you need to use 'Loadmodule' to load up the patched scsi device.
No I am using 3.1, I like to set up from scratch and work on trying things myself (it's the thing i miss most when using windows).

Once I get all of my hardware sorted out I will be looking to boot with an OS selector and have 3.1, 3.5, 3.9, Scalos and Dopus5 installed too. But that is further down the line.
 
Like FitzSteve said, you need to get loadmodule. and load a modern scsi.device. (Except for IDEfix that comes with its own loader)
Using SFS, it doesn't matter much which version you use, Idefix, 43.45, 44.2, 43.47 all support NSD.

Having correct size showing everywhere, is a different (and much less important) problem.

HDToolbox 'read configuration' will display a negative size for drives >2GB, and the partition sliders will 'reset' every 4gb.
This can safely be ignored. You can keep dragging the partition size and count in multiples of 4gb, as long as you watch the cylinder values in the lower left and see no negative values. (I've had this a few times on partitions above 16gb).
If you see negative cylinder values, just start over and enter the cylinder values manually instead.

You also need to remember that the amigaOS format command, and any other program that accesses the drive directly (Salvage or defrag tools, etc) will not work above 4GB. So quick format only, and careful with those tools.

Like hdtoolbox, workbench and info command will show negative total size above 2GB partitions. This is completely safe. There might be some patches specifically for this, I don't know..

Edit: And don't forget a maxtransfer setting of 0x1fe00 for each partition, also on real hard drives. (You need to press enter to store the values..)

[More in-depth info here.]
 
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