8gb CF harddrive prep recommendations...

[th4t1guy]

I have an 8gb CF card installed on my cd32. I would like to install ClassicWB on it, so I'm wondering what you guys would recommend for partition/harddrive preperation for it?

After digging through old threads on this forum it seems like making one large 8gb partition is not recommended because the harddrive may need to be revalidated, but it seems like using SFS fixes this issue. I was able to get an 8gb partition created with what I assume is SFS (yet all the tools in classicwb seemed to tell me it was OFS), and classicWB was running on it. However, the machine guru'd on a whdload game, and now I can't access the partition. I can just redo everything, but I'm hoping to avoid this problem in the future.

Any recommendations on partition sizes, filesystem to use and so forth?

[thomas]

You need SmartFileSystem version 1.84 or FastFileSystem version 44 to use harddrives bigger than 4GB without an update for the HDD driver. Older or newer version won't work.

Use check4gb to check it when you're done, before you copy many files to the partition.

[Toni Wilen]

SFS won't help if ROM harddrive device driver isn't 64-bit safe and with >4G boot partition device driver in ROM must be 64-bit safe or sooner or later bad things will happen.

Old SFS with direct SCSI or PFS3DS _might_ work if device driver has proper HD_SCSICMD support. It is practically guaranteed to work with real SCSI interfaces but IDE driver needs translation and translation routines may not support large disks..

<4G boot partition at the beginning of the drive (important!) + 64-bit patches installed is safest option.

(EDIT: took too long to write apparently)

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by thomas

FastFileSystem version 44 to use harddrives bigger than 4GB without an update for the HDD driver.

I never knew about this. I always thought it was TD64 only but it does support HD_SCSICMD. Nice.