A1200 + 40gb + SFS Help needed

[MarlboroMan]

I got a big problem with a 40 gb ide drive on my a1200.
What i wanted to do was to replace my 2 hdds (internal 2,5 " 170 mb ide drive and a external 1,2 gb ide drive) with 1 external 40 gb ide hdd because the old 170 mb drive is very slow and ... old.

What ive done is backup all data from both drives by creating a hdfs. Then i conncected the new 40 gb drive to my pc and partitioned it to 6 partitions with 3,9 gb each, then i installed SFS on each partition (exactly following KGs awesome tutorial ).

Afterwards i copied back my stuff to the correct partitions.

What i now have is a system which crashes (8000004) if i write anything on any partition and renders the partition to a non dos disk

The drive is connected as master to a 4-way ide splitter (RandyRom). Cdrom on the same cable as slave.

Amiga is A1200 with Kick 3.1, Blizzard 1230 with 32 mb ram. System ran flawless before hdd swap

[thomas]

You cannot use more than the first 4GB of the drive without patched drivers. This is not a matter of partition size but of disk size. Partition size does not matter.

However, crashing is clearly a fault of SFS, not of the system. It should either give an error message or just ignore the partition, but it should not crash.

In order to use the drive with WB 3.1, you have to install the updated scsi.device from here: http://os.amigaworld.de/index.php?lang=en&page=37
You also need this to remove beta warnings: http://aminet.net/package/util/sys/patchstrip
And you better use Thor's LoadModule rather than the old LoadV43Module: http://aminet.net/package/util/boot/LoadModule

A better (cleaner) solution would be to install OS3.5 or 3.9.

BTW, WinUAE's new IDE emulation should help you to recreate the problem on the PC. Just connect the HDD to "IDE0" in WinUAE's properties.

The drive is connected as master to a 4-way ide splitter (RandyRom). Cdrom on the same cable as slave.

Erm, overlooked this before. Which software do you use to drive the splitter ? If it is IDEfix, update to the latest version of IDEfix97 and make it resident (use C:LoadIDE instead of C:IDEfix). Then you don't need the patches mentioned above.

[MarlboroMan]

Yes im using a registered version of idefix97 and i have loadide in my startup sequence.

Loadide or idefix alone is enough to patch the scsi.device? i thought i need nsdpatch or td64 or similar?

Ill try reformating it with the new winuae version. Perhaps it helps.

[MarlboroMan]

Update: The guru error code seems to be random. After trying to delete some random files it gives me now SFS error "findextendbnode() cant find key blah"

[thomas]

Try to increase the number of buffers per partition. I think that SFS can crash if there are not enough buffers. However, I don't know what the recommended number of buffers is for a 3.9 GB partition with SFS. Try anything between 100 and 500.

BTW, only the boot partition has to be less than 4GB. The other partitions can be as large as you like.

[MarlboroMan]

Thanks for help Thomas. I think you were right with the buffers. I followed KGs guide but it seems i forgot to set the correct buffer size for each partition.

(In fact i typed it in but forgot to press enter afterwards )