Help configuring a ST34371N 4gig on an A2000

[ahandyman59]

I have an A2000 with 3.1 kickstart. The scsi controller I am using is an A2091. What parameters do I use for this? Yes, I have the PDF of the drive from Seagate, but the partition information is talking blocks and cylinders versus bytes and tracks, I think. Is there some kind of advice link or website that talks about how to set up larger SCSI drives for these older machines?

[idrougge]

In HDToolbox, just go into Define new -> Read configuration.

[Jope]

No tricks needed. Check your 2091 ROM version, if it is under 7.0, then you should upgrade to use the full 4GB.

[zipper]

And as it is 4.3 GB afaik do the tricks needed for 4+ GB. I think I had a similar one in my A500/Blizzard2060 and the P5 software recognized the size and asked if it should be restricted to 4 GB and I did.

[ahandyman59]

I've tried the read configuration option several times and if it works at all, it seems to show like 22mb or 50mb, so that's not going to fix the problem. The roms on the other hand could be the problem. I have 3 2091 cards (5 a2000s). I'll check later this evening and see if one of them has the desired roms... Thank you.

[thomas]

Read Capacity should always give the same result. If it gives you a different result every time you try, then the drive is not working properly or it is not connected / teminated properly.

The capacity of the drive is cylinders * heads * blocks per track * 512, no matter what HDToolbox displays. However, if HDToolbox shows a very small capacity, then you should reduce the number of cylinders until it displays something around 4095 MB. Larger capacities will wrap around to zero, both in HDToolbox and in real live when accessing the drive. The latter is deadly for your data and should therefore be avoided.

Blocks per cylinder is heads * blocks per track.

[shaf]

Not all Amiga SCSI controllers will see a 4 GB Drives, for example I've worked with Comspec Controllers for the A1000 that will only work with sizes below 512MB. It depends on what SCSI command set is supported, some controllers only read SCSI1 specs, SCSI2 specs are not always read properly. To confuse the matter more some very old smaller capacity drives are cylinders * heads * blocks per track * 256.

[ahandyman59]

Please bear with me. This drive is a 4 gig drive...

My a2091 does have v7 roms installed.

It displays this information when I "Read Configuration From Drive":
Cylinders: 574
Heads: 1 Size: 45896K (44meg)
Blocks per Track: 14800
Blocks per Cylinder: 14800

It's completely wrong.


The Seagate support pdf gives the following information:
Again this is a 4gb drive when formatted...

Drive Capacity 5.31gb (UNFORMATTED)
Read/Write Heads: 10
Bytes/Track: 102500 bytes
Bytes/Surface, Total: 531 Mbytes
Tracks/Surface, Total: 5178 tracks
Tracks/Inch: 5555 TPI

etc...

How do I convert this Seagate information to something the A2091 will understand? If I only get say 3 gig out of the drive, I'm OK with that, but I need parameters...

[ahandyman59]

Oh, I'm using version 1.30 of the A2091 setup disk, which has HD Toolbox on it...

[shaf]

Don't use the 2091 Setup disk it is based in WB 1.3, since you're running WB3.1 version use the WB Install disk to setup the HDD. It has a better SCSI Driver for the 2091.

[ahandyman59]

The hdtools on v3.10 install does not find any hard drive, where the a2091 disk did... Any other suggestions?

[thomas]

Originally Posted by ahandyman59

It displays this information when I "Read Configuration From Drive":
Cylinders: 574
Heads: 1 Size: 45896K (44meg)
Blocks per Track: 14800
Blocks per Cylinder: 14800

It's completely wrong.

It's completely right. 574 * 1 * 14,800 * 512 Bytes = 4,349,542,400 Bytes = 4.051 GiB.

It's a little more than 4 GiB. As it wraps around at 4 GiB you only see the remainder.

To be more granular at partitioning you should use these values:

Cylinders: 5739
Heads: 1
Blocks per Track: 1480
Blocks per Cylinder: 1480

Cylinders already reduced to stay below 4 GiB.

5667 * 1 * 1480 * 512 Bytes = 4,294,225,920 Bytes = 3.999 GiB

Remember to press Enter or Tab in each field you change.

The Seagate support pdf gives the following information:

There is no useful information in this PDF. Only hardware information which is not seen by the operating system. What you actually need is the highest LBA a.k.a. the number of user sectors. I didn't find this value anywhere in the PDF.

[ahandyman59]

Thank you Thomas, for this! You solved the problem and provided me an algorithm of sorts, to figure out this problem in the future! The hard drive formatted perfectly and now has a total of just under 4 gb...