Winuae and 4.5 GB HDF

[Fred the Fop]

As per a discussion with Stareye and KillerGorilla on IRC recently, I decided to create a 4.5 GB HDF to unlzx all my favourite WHDLoad games into this huge HDF and burn it onto DVD for safekeeping.
Of course the idea behind this is to have all these games readily available on Winuae if I want, by mounting the HDF.
Thing is, when I formatted this under FFS, (as suggested by the OS in Bloodwych's nice Workbench setup), it the HDF is read as only 650 MB. What gives?

[Bloodwych]

I have problems with large HDFs. The way around it is to use HD directories for WHDload games and demos and only keep workbench on the HDF.

A suggested setup is here:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=19056

[Fred the Fop]

Hey Bloody, yo ho
Well, what about I just make six 700 MB HDFs? Would that be ok?

[OddbOd]

Yes multiple smaller hardfiles should be fine but it's the Amiga's 4GB limit that is causing most of your trouble, I'll give you an alternative approach then you can decide what you want to do.

As mentioned above, unless your system is setup to support 64Bit disk addressing then partitions larger than 4GB (thats binary gigabytes i.e. 2^32 bytes not 4x10^9) are not supported by AmigaDOS, there are several ways to overcome this but in your case I think it would be much easier to simply avoid the problem. So first things first create a Hardfile no bigger than 4096MB and enable RDB mode, also you could put your Workbench setup on each DVD as you have the difference between the partition limit and the DVDs capacity to play with (~370MB if memory serves me correctly).

WinUAE seems to have trouble with large Non-RDB hardfiles, they don't appear to work correctly with RDB prep tools so again it's probably a good idea to avoid the issue and stick to RDB mode which works just fine. Don't worry you won't have to do any nasty mathematics to work out correct sizing. Edit: Thomas is quite right, this paragraph doesn't even make much sense, I mustn't have completely woken up when I wrote it.

To create the RDB use HD Install Tools as RDPrep will probably crash and dealing with HDToolBox is just too painful especially if you have a mixture of simple and RDB hardfiles. It's extremely easy to use even in manual mode and once you have saved your drive parameters the hardfile should mount/format just like any other disk.

[thomas]

@Fred the Duck: if you want to have the games readily available, you should install them to a harddisk directory and write the directory to DVD. This way you can access the files from everywhere, even on a real Amiga. With A HDF you always need a version of WinUAE or another software which supports reading HDFs.

WinUAE does not have a problem with large HDFs, but AmigaOS has. Even if you manage to create a partition bigger than 4GB (with OS3.9 or SFS or PFS3), AmigaOS will still report bad values for the free space and installers might complain about not enough spave being available although the entire HDD is empty.