No sense error

[Exodus]

It's been a long time since I came here, because I didn't have any problems up until now. Recently, I'm receiving the following error when accessing a hard file under WinUAE 0.8.22r7 which I should put down on my list of errors that make no sense:

hd: tried to seek out of bounds! (FFFFFFFFFFFFC000 >= 0)

What the hell does this mean? The settings for the hard file are:
Read/Write Enabled
Device=DH0: BootPri=0 Surfaces=1 Sectors=32 Reserved=2 Block Size=512 FileSys=none

I haven't had this problem with previous WinUAE releases.

[Toni Wilen]

What is the size of hardfile in bytes? (Windows-side size, not Amiga)

[Exodus]

The size of the hardfile I have created is 50000000 bytes.

[Chuckles]

Taking a look at the information in your post, the size you picked for your hardfile looks like it was intended to be 50 megabytes, but the definition of a megabyte in computerese is not 1,000,000 bytes, just as the definition of 1 kilobyte is not 1,000 bytes. Since computers tend to prefer to work with the computerese versions of kilobytes and megabytes, 1 kilobyte = 1,024 bytes while 1 megabyte = 1,024 x 1,024 or 1,048,576 bytes. A 50 megabyte partition would thus be 50 times that, or 52,428,800 bytes long. I've had similar problems occur when dealing with emulated hard drives with other emulators. The block size you specified is 512 (which is normal), but the entire hardfile size should be a multiple of that to avoid having what theoretically should be an available block of 512 bytes at the end the hardfile, when there are less than 512 bytes remaining. A hardfile that is created with a size such as yours may work just fine for a long time, but it's a ticking bomb - eventually the OS will try to allocate that last block to some file, and when it does you're likely to see an error such as the one you received.

[Toni Wilen]

WinUAE automatically fixes non-block size divisable hardfiles so thats not the problem. (50 000 000 is internally changed to 49 999 872)

It seems for some reason WinUAE thinks block size or size of hdf is zero..

Exodus: could you attach your config file?

[Chuckles]

@Toni
That's a smart thing to have anticipated and handled in the code, and I wasn't aware of it. Other emulators would do well to do the same. It does make me wonder one thing though. Years ago I installed a hard drive on my A500 and partitioned it into several logical drives, and I seem to recall having had to specify entries in my mountlist that indicated the number of sectors, the block size, and the beginning and ending cylinder/track numbers. The partition size could be easily calculated by taking the number of sectors times the block size, and then multiplying again by the number of cylinders/tracks. This worked because each track always had the same number of sectors as any other track. With an emulated hardfile though, the final track may have less sectors than all the others though, if the total size is not a multiple of the number of sectors times the block size. Not knowing how the Amiga file system determines how many total blocks it has available for use on a hardfile, could this be a problem, or can it handle such partial tracks?

[Exodus]

Damn. I was used to typing in 50000000 in older UAE versions that I accidently typed that same number in 0.8.22r7, which was probably why I got that nonsense error message.

Toni, config file is attached.