Amiga 1200 Hard drive limit

[AMIGrAve]

What is the limit in gigabyte for a 2" IDE hard drive in an amiga 1200 ?

[Zetr0]

Hello AMIGrave,

Welcome to the EAB, I am sure you will like it here

okay to your question.

Under Kickstart 3.0 it is 4GB

under Kickstart 3.1 and OS 3.1 / 3.5 you can modify the format type to the new and MUCH improved SFS to allow 200GB if you wish! ( i would recomend a faster than stock processor + a little mem )

you need to replace the the scsi.device with the one attached, and then install the new Smart File System

you can then choose this system as a format type in HDtoolsbox

[AMIGrAve]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

Hello AMIGrave,
Welcome to the EAB, I am sure you will like it here

Thanks! It seems this forum is full of people with great technical knowledge of the Amiga !! This is cool ! I have a bunch of questions to ask ;-)

Originally Posted by Zetr0

under Kickstart 3.1 and OS 3.1 / 3.5 you can modify the format type to the new and MUCH improved SFS to allow 200GB if you wish! ( i would recomend a faster than stock processor + a little mem )
you need to replace the the scsi.device with the one attached, and then install the new Smart File System
you can then choose this system as a format type in HDtoolsbox

Cool ! Anyway I wonder two things :
If I have only one bootable partition with the system using SFS, will the amiga kickstart be able to actually boot on the SFS partition and actually read the .device files it needs ?
I don't know technically how does the booting process works on the amiga.
So I mean : if there are specials .devices files that are needed in order to be able to handle the SFS filesystem, then these files have to be read by the system, but this last won't be able to handle it at boot time !? Either I'm missing a point (I hope so) either the SFS partition should be a second one, not bootable, but usable when a normal FFS partition has been booted first.

The second thing I was worried about was the linux support for SFS because I would like to copy files on my PC to hard drive before mounting it in the amiga. Anyway I found this so I guess it will be ok :
http://home.elka.pw.edu.pl/~mszyprow/programy/asfs/

There's a last thing I'm not sure about :
When you say that Kickstart 3.1 and OS 3.1 / 3.5 are needed for SFS, does OS 3.1 / 3.5 means Workbench 3.1 / 3.5 ?

In fact I'm not using workbench, I'm always under a shell with filemaster at hand. I hope that I'll just have to copy the /devs /libs /l and /c from the workbench 3.1 without having to install a full workbench, right ?


PS: I hope my questions are not too silly.

[Skylight]

Originally Posted by AMIGrAve

If I have only one bootable partition with the system using SFS, will the amiga kickstart be able to actually boot on the SFS partition and actually read the .device files it needs ?
I don't know technically how does the booting process works on the amiga.
So I mean : if there are specials .devices files that are needed in order to be able to handle the SFS filesystem, then these files have to be read by the system, but this last won't be able to handle it at boot time !? Either I'm missing a point (I hope so) either the SFS partition should be a second one, not bootable, but usable when a normal FFS partition has been booted first.

You can use SFS for your boot partition as long as you save the SFS filesystem handler in the RDB (Rigid Disk Block) of your HD.
HDToolBox can do this for you.
Amiga filesystems are handlers (stored in "L" directory or RDB) and no devices.

But since the scsi.device of your (original) Kickstart ROM will never support partitions or even HD's with more than 4GB you must keep your boot partition below this barrier.

You can replace the scsi.device later in your RAM, but at boot time you must live with the scsi.device from your Kickstart ROM.
There are of course ways to burn your own Kickstart EPROM with more recent device drivers, but that's maybe too complicated for you.

If you wanna be on the real safe side then use FFS boot partitions up to 2GB(!) and for everything else you can use SFS.

You should use NSD (New Style Device) to support bigger partitions than 4GB:
http://aminet.net/disk/misc/NSDPatch43_20.lha

That's the way of AMIGA Technologies.


btw ... starting with V3.1 the AMIGA operating system is just called "AMIGA OS 3.x" or "OS 4.0" since the workbench is only a small part of it.
And even if you don't use the workbench GUI you will still need many other parts of these operating systems.


Ciao, Rick ...