Yet another 4gig limit thread?

[thinlega]

I have formated my 4.3gig HD in HDtools to a size just under 4gig. I have then partitioned it 4 times at a size of 999mb each. Is this ok...because i have heard that there is also a partition size limit???

The reason i ask is that my second partition was not showing amiga files that i copyed to it. So i formated it again as DH1 and half way throgh the format it said "Insert DH1" and arsed up.....any suggestions would be helpful.....ta

[Enverex]

Originally posted by thinlega
I have formated my 4.3gig HD in HDtools to a size just under 4gig. I have then partitioned it 4 times at a size of 999mb each. Is this ok...because i have heard that there is also a partition size limit???

The reason i ask is that my second partition was not showing amiga files that i copyed to it. So i formated it again as DH1 and half way throgh the format it said "Insert DH1" and arsed up.....any suggestions would be helpful.....ta

Just use SFS on the drive and all you have to worry about is the 4GB partition limit.

[thomas]

You shouldn't name the formatted volume the same as the partition. AmigaDOS easily becomes confused about like-named objects. Format your DH0 partition as System, DH1 as Work, DH2 as Data, DH3 as Music and so on (just an example).

AFAIK there is no partition size limit below 4GB. Create one 500MB system partition, one 2000MB work partition and one 1500MB backup partition and you'll be fine. (Note that if a partition has more than 2GB of free space, some programs might report negative values or refuse to copy files to it).

Also these 4.3 "gig" sound much like 4.3 billion bytes which actually is 4 gig (just below the limit). HDToolbox should give you the value in "real" gigs.

[Enverex]

Originally posted by thomas
Also these 4.3 "gig" sound much like 4.3 billion bytes which actually is 4 gig (just below the limit). HDToolbox should give you the value in "real" gigs.

Only if it is OS3.5 or 3.9's HDToolbox. When any previous versions get to 4GB they simply wrap back around to 1MB. Not good.

[thinlega]

hummm....

How do you manually calculate the "Blocks Per Track" and "Blocks per Cylinder values"

My HD label says:
8930 cylinders
15 heads
63 sectors

the "read configuration" option always says it is 24meg........once again thanks for zee help!

[thomas]

Heads = Tracks per Cylinder
Sectors = Blocks per Track

Blocks per Cylinder = Blocks per Track * Tracks per Cylinder

Total number of blocks = 63 * 15 * 8930 = 8,438,850

The number of bytes per block is usually 512 so the capacity of the drive is 8,438,850 * 512 = 4,320,691,200 bytes / 1024 / 1024 /1024 = 4.02 GB

If you manually change the number of cylinders to 8876, you will loose 25 MB but stay completely below the 4GB limit and have no problems at all. You can then use all the space for partitions.