Large hard drives and WB3.0...
 

I've just got hold of a 30Gb 2.5" HD and I'm really hoping I can use it in my A1200 which only has 3.0 ROMs. Now I know that this limits the file system to only recognising 4.3Gb of the hard drive but I also have a smaller 60Mb drive which I was hoping I could use to boot from and then maybe mount the 30Gb drive with a file system that would recognise the larger capacity (SFS, PFS?).

Is there any way to do this or is the only way to use a large drive with 3.0 ROMs by buying a Power Flyer or upgrading to OS3.9. (The latter I do not wish to do on this particular machine for compatibility purposes and chip ram issues with WHDload games.)

Any help would be greatly appreciated. :)

You don't need the 60MB HDD. You can create a boot partition within the first 4GB of the 30GB HDD which installs the needed patches to access the rest of the drive.

You can download a replacement for the scsi.device here: http://home.arcor.de/micky.d/IDE.html (the page is in german but the links at the bottom will work for english people, too :-) ).

In additon you have to use a new file system which can use 64bit commands. I strongly recommend SFS for this.

Bye,
Thomas

That sounds like exactly what I want. Thanks Thomas.

regards,
darkwave.

You don't need to mount a 3rd party filesystem from an FFS boot. SFS, for example, can be installed on the RDB meaning you can boot straight from and SFS partition.

I ran my Amiga with nothing but SFS for years (and I still use SFS on WinUAE) - and I never tired of NOT having to see the "Disk Validating" message :-)