Installing a large hard drive

[Tahoe]

I have never really used drives larger then 4GB however I now ran into a nice 73GB 10K SCSI which I intend to connect to my Cyberstorm. By doing this I want to remove the IDE drive and do a clean install on the SCSI drive.
What is the best way to go abouit doing this? Should I partition/format the drive using 3.1 install? Do i need OS3.9 HDToolBox? Do I need SFS?

This is all quite new for me, a n00b guide would be nice :-D

[Quixote]

;-) The default filesystem included with Workbench 3.1 is a 32-bit file system, and will not support drives larger than 4 binary gigabytes, or 4.3 decimal gigabytes. The filesystem in Workbench 3.9 works just fine.

If you're going to start with 3.1 and upgade, you'll still be okay, if you ensure that your boot partition remains within the first 4 gigs. Everything above that can be partitioned and formatted later, with 3.9's HD tools.

Another thing to be aware of, if you've only used <4.3 Gigabyte harddrives hitherto: some programs like Shapeshifter will drive the hardware directly when using partitions set aside for them, and do not support 64-bit addressing. Insure that their partitions exist wholly inside the first four gigs, as well. Disksalv also doesn't work outside 4 gigs.

[AMIGAZ]

When I installed SCSI drives in my A4000 with CS MKII and in my A4000 with CS MKIII I booted from my IDE drives with OS3.9 and partitioned the SCSI hd from there and formatted because I couldn't see the SCSI drive in either hdinsttools or hdtoolbox (WB3.1) even if I pointed to cybscsi.device and cyppc.device.

[Robert17]

I think you have to make the boot partition for 3.9 less than 4 gig, but I'm using a 36gb drive on my cyberstormppc scsi, 2x 15gig partitions using SFS, and 1 1gig, and a 4.3 gig using FFS, works fine here :-)

Robert

[amigakit]

The boot partition should be less than 2.1GB.

[Thomas]

amigakit wrote:
The boot partition should be less than 2.1GB.


No, is doesn't need to. With a Cyberstorm SCSI and SFS all partitions can be as big as you like.

You shouldn't use FFS on a big drive.

Bye,
Thomas

[Framiga]

first of all, don't get rid of the IDE HD until you are 100% sure that the new SCSI hd is recognizes, formatted and filled with your SYS: partition.

Use HDToolbox of AOS3.9 BB2.

The Boot partition MUST be in the first 2 GB of the disk (better if you use a 300 MB for SYS:)

Then feel free to create as partition you need.

Use SFS with blocks of 512 bytes for each partition with ~400 dosbuffers.

When you will load the SmatFileSystem in HDToolbox, check if the Identifier is right

0x53465300 SFS\00

If HDToolbox fails to see it, type it manually.

Set the partition as bootable with an higher priority than the IDE one.

If something goes wrong, you can always boot with the IDE HD (from Early SS)

[Framiga]

@Thomas

so you wanna say that, the boot partition MUST "start" within the 2 first 2GB of the disk NOT that MUST be less than 2GB? . . .right?

[Thomas]

No, I want so say that there is no restriction at all for partition size and position with a Phase5 (or DCE) SCSI controller in combination with SFS.

The "2GB within the first 4GB" limit applies only to a boot partition which needs to load patches that are not available in ROM. But the SCSI driver already supports TD64 commands as does SFS. So there is no restriction at all. You can even create a 100GB boot partition (don't know what the partition size limit of SFS is, but I am quite sure there is one, probably around 107GB or so like PFS).

Please note that FFS does *not* support TD64 commands but only NSD commands. So for FFS you have to start NSDPatch first which means that the 2GB limit applies here.

Bye,
Thomas

[Framiga]

oh well, Thanks :-)

shameless request:

so a P5 scsi device has no need to be NDSpatched?

I've noticed that NSDPatch, adds some commands to TD64.

Thanks

[Thomas]

The P5 scsi device does not support NSD, so it has to be patched in order to support NSD. NSD is more than just 64 bit commands. NSD mainly is for identifying the type of device without knowing it. And NSD uses different 64 bit commands than TD64 (unfortunately). This is the reason why FFS can be made to work with P5 scsi using NSDPatch but does not work with it out of the box.

AFAIK all of the above is also true for the Buddha and FastATA IDE conrtollers. The FastATA even supports NSD 64 bit comand, so you can use OS3.9's FFS with it without the 2GB restriction.

Bye,
Thomas

[Framiga]

Thanks a lot Thomas . . . i've asked in the past but nobody else, has answered with valid arguments.

Thanks :-)

PS- fortunately, i've NDSPatched the cybppc.device from the beginning . . .

EDIT- otherwise IdeFix scsi.device is already NSD compliant . . . please tell me yes!!!

EDIT2- FRAMIGA!!!! why don't you use:

8/0.AmigaOS:> check4gb scsi.device 0
scsi.device unit 0 supports NSD commands
scsi.device unit 0 supports TD64 commands
scsi.device unit 0 supports SCSI-Direct commands

:-D

[Tahoe]

Guys, thanks!!! You are the best!

Installed my WB3.1 on a 1GB partition and it boots just fine. Little tricky to get working but managed it.
I first prepped the 1GB partition using ExpertPrep, that managed to hang my CS upon boot up. 3.1 Install would guru on startup (060 libs). So booted from expertprep, made the partition with Phase5 SCSIConfig, formatted, installed 3.1, manually copied the 060 libs and hey presto! I'm up and running!
And the machine boots WorkBench in +- 1.5 seconds, windows eat your hart out!!!