How do I mount a 500MB FAT16 volume?
 

I have created a hardfile and formated it with MS-DOS on PCTask, but now I cant mount the volume to make it visible on AmigaOS. I have tried to use the tool that come with PCTask to mount it automatically, and even tried to edit my own mountlist, without luck.

I do know that I need to use the CrossDos handler for that, but the problem that I have is to decipher the parameters that I need to use for the blocks, sectors, cylinders and so on.

Can anyone show for me how do I can find these values on my hardfile?

I vaguely remember having problems with this when the partition was larger than a certain size. It was certainly possible with a mountlist and the geometry information from HDToolbox though. I can check my own mountlists later on and see if I still have the info on my A1200...

Couple of things to check: Does it work with the Fat95 filesystem instead of CrossDOS? And is the entire partition within the first 4GB of the hard drive? PC-Task had issues with partitions above the 4GB mark I seem to remember...

Actually, GiggleDisk might be worth a look too - it looks like it does all the hard work for you: http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/giggledisk

Well, I've checked and I don't have the PC partition any more. The mountlist is very simple however, looks like the lowcyl and highcyl are just the values from HDToolbox times the blocksize (512), and L:CrossDOSFileSystem is the filesystem. It used to work anyway...

Yes, this should work fine with FAT95 file system, just check it out on Aminet :)

I used to use mountdos which worked very well for zip disks.
It is on aminet.

Do you mean hardfile as in HDF or Partition?

*Facepalm* Sorry, I automatically took it as a hard drive partition. Never used a hardfile :(

I'm not sure what he means either, wait until he replies, he might surprise us both ;)

Now I should say that I am unsure if I understand the question correctly, as your irony make me feel confused now (no offense, really). :)

Eh eh, what I meant is a hardfile partition, well it's an IDE hardfile with a single 500 MB partition on the first 4 GB of data. So it's not an standard UAE one (which doesn't use a RDB).

I think that if I did the things correctly as it should be done, there shouldn't be any difference between that hardfile or a real harddisk, or even a partition in the middle of another hardfile, am I right?

In order to use the tool which comes with PCTask you first have to install hardfile.device to Devs:, then the hardfile has to be named as Hardfile0 and stored in a directory which has HF: assigned to it (so that you can refer to it as HF:Hardfile0).

Inception-tastic! So, it's a UAE hardfile that the emulated Amiga sees as a genuine, standard hard drive, and on that you've got a RDB, and a 500MB partition you've set up with HDToolbox. Is that right?

One thing I noticed when I was checking out my setup is that both mountlists I had for two different MS-DOS partitions were around 460MB each. Perhaps 500MB is too large to mount under FAT16? I vaguely remember having a reason for picking 460MB as a partition size instead of anything larger.

Yes, thats right. :)

I have installed Windows 3.1 on the hardfile, the only thing that doesnt works is accessing it from Workbench. But I am wrong about the partition size, it's 2 GB (I wanted to copy two shareware cd-roms to it). It works in Windows 3.1 (DOS 6.22 has allegedly 2GB limit for partitions), but AmigaDOS can't access it.

I tried giggledisk but I could not mount the partition with it. The file system which that tool uses is CrossDos. I noticed that when I boot Workbench the drive (DH2) is already mounted, but Workbench doesnt show the disk icon and AmigaShell can't read any files therein. So I dismounted it first, and tried pasting the fat95 file system name on the mount list that giggledisk generates, and remount that device but it didnt work.

Reserved = 1 in the mountlist ?
If your hd image has been made with PC-Task, the first block (512 bytes) is to be ignored, fat95 or crossdos can't decode this block.