Vanilla A1200 with a 6GB hard drive, is this safe?

Hi, I have recently bought a replacement A1200 for my old one which developed a graphics problem.

It came with a clean 6GB hard drive preinstalled with Workbench 3.1 (Kickstart 3.0 roms), split into 2 3gb FFS partitions.

Is it safe to use this hard drive? Some places state up to 8gb is safe as long as the partitions are less than 4gb each whereas some say anything over 4gb is dangerous. I don't have a big problem reformating as a 4gb drive in 2 2gb partitions (my old drive was only 500mb) but it'd be good to know if this is needed.

[thomas]

If only parts of WB 3.1 / Kick 3.0 are used, then this setup is very dangerous. You should change it to two 2 GB partitions and leave the rest unused. Or just don't use the second 3 GB partition. Saving files to it will corrupt the first partition.

However, with only another file system the entire 6 GB could be used (up to 8 GB).

To use more than 8 GB a new IDE driver is needed additionally.

If you know how to get files from the internet to your Amiga, you can run this to be sure: http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/check4gb

One thing you can do already now is this:

Open a Shell window (in the System drawer of the boot partition)
Enter info
Find your partitions. The name displayed on the desktop is on the last column. You need the name from the first column.
Enter
version <name from the first column>:

If it outputs a version other than filesystem 40 or 39, then you might be safe.

Example (my partitions are named Workbench and Work, hence I need to check WDH0 and WDH1):

4> info

Mounted disks:
Unit      Size    Used    Free Full Errs   Status   Name
RAM:      435K     435       0 100%   0  Read/Write Ram Disk
WDH0:      50M   36818   67106  35%   0  Read/Write Workbench
DF0:      No disk present
DF1:      No disk present
WDH1:     447M  180539  736639  20%   0  Read/Write Work

Volumes available:
Ram Disk [Mounted]
Work [Mounted]
Workbench [Mounted]
4> version wdh0:
SmartFilesystem 1.279
4> version wdh1: 
SmartFilesystem 1.279
4>

Brilliant, thanks for the update, greatly appreciated.

Time to get my old cross dos disk and try out that utility.