HDToolBox & Medea SCSI RAID size discrepancy

[jaesonk]

I have a 180GB external Medea Video RAID attached to my DraCo SCSI bus. This hardware RAID should just show up as a single drive, and it does, but the size is about 40GB.



I have an internal drive that is 120GB and that's ok.


Any ideas why the Medea Video RAID is coming up short with HD Toolbox? I can set it up as 40GB and format as such but I'd rather use the full capacity.

I'm running AmigaOS3.9 on my DraCo.


Thanks.

[Jpor]

Originally Posted by jaesonk

I have a 180GB external Medea Video RAID attached to my DraCo SCSI bus. This hardware RAID should just show up as a single drive, and it does, but the size is about 40GB.



I have an internal drive that is 120GB and that's ok.


Any ideas why the Medea Video RAID is coming up short with HD Toolbox? I can set it up as 40GB and format as such but I'd rather use the full capacity.

I'm running AmigaOS3.9 on my DraCo.


Thanks.

Possibly the Draco Firmware has a limitation on drive size? Have had something similar happen to me with the 1230scsi.device firmware.

Have you tried a later version of HDToolbox?

[Jope]

Did you calculate the size yourself based on the geometry that HDToolBox autodetected?

[jaesonk]

I'll have to check my version of HDToolBox. What is the latest version available for OS3.9?

Are there any OS3.9 compatible alternatives to HDToolBox? I saw HDInstTool on aminet but haven't tried that. Is it better/same/worse?

Thanks.

[jaesonk]

Originally Posted by Jope

Did you calculate the size yourself based on the geometry that HDToolBox autodetected?

I installed the drive first with HDToolBox and used what it queried. Then I partitioned the drive with a single partition.

[jaesonk]

My HDToolBox is version 45.2.

[Jope]

That version of HDTB should calculate correctly and the reported geometry seems to match the indicated capacity as well, so it seems the dracoscsi driver does not like this drive.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by Jope

the reported geometry seems to match the indicated capacity

Really? The OP says 180G, the first screenshot shows 745G and the geometry is for 41G. I don't see any match here.


@jaesonk: please run this program and attach the report here: http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online.../hddreport.lha

[jaesonk]

Originally Posted by thomas

Really? The OP says 180G, the first screenshot shows 745G and the geometry is for 41G. I don't see any match here.


@jaesonk: please run this program and attach the report here: http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online.../hddreport.lha

Yes. I'm getting some mixed reports within HDToolBox on this RAID. I'll give hddreport a try and let you know how that goes. Thanks for the suggestion.



I do have a couple other size Medea Video RAIDs to try out. I picked up a bundle of them.

I'd also like to attach these to one of my other Amiga systems and see if it's reported differently on different controllers. My A1200 has a Blizzard 1260 with SCSI and my A4000 has a GVP T-REX with SCSI. The A4000 is apart at the moment, but when reassembled it will be running OS3.2. I'd like to try installing OS3.2 on the DraCo at some point too.

I also want to try the RAID with a Casablanca to see if DraCo could import media captured on the Cassie. My Cassie is the 68060 version.

IF the RAID size is correctly recognized and formatted with a different SCSI controller, could that formatted RAID then be attached to DraCo and used, or would DraCo still potentially have problems with it?

[thomas]

Yes, you can swap drives from one Amiga to another one. But you can as well stay on the Draco.

IMHO it's just a bug in this version of HDToolbox, nothing else. You can enter the correct values manually. The geometry is already set up so that one cylinder is one megabyte. So you can just adjust the number of cylinders to something around 180,000 to get your 180 GB capacity. The HDD report will tell the actual number of sectors on the drive, divide that by 2048 to get the nearest number of cylinders.

Another option would be to use a different software. For example the Phase 5 SCSI software which comes with the Blizzard SCSI kit.

[jaesonk]

Originally Posted by thomas

Yes, you can swap drives from one Amiga to another one. But you can as well stay on the Draco.

IMHO it's just a bug in this version of HDToolbox, nothing else. You can enter the correct values manually. The geometry is already set up so that one cylinder is one megabyte. So you can just adjust the number of cylinders to something around 180,000 to get your 180 GB capacity. The HDD report will tell the actual number of sectors on the drive, divide that by 2048 to get the nearest number of cylinders.

Another option would be to use a different software. For example the Phase 5 SCSI software which comes with the Blizzard SCSI kit.

Thanks for these suggestions. I wondered if I could just bump up the cylinder count but haven't tried it yet.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by thomas

Really? The OP says 180G, the first screenshot shows 745G and the geometry is for 41G. I don't see any match here.

I believe you can see a match in the 41G screen shot and the geometry reported there. That's all I was referring to.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by Jope

you can see a match in the 41G screen shot and the geometry reported there

That's true. But HDToolbox never had an issue with this.

The issue is that the reported capacity does not match the expected capacity.

And the capacity shown in the HDD overview is completely off, although it should come from the same source (the number of sectors reported by the SCSI READ CAPACITY command).

[jaesonk]

UPDATE

I manually adjusted the cylinder count to bring it up to 180GB. Then I successfully made several partitions and formatted them. The largest individual partition is 85GB. I may redo the partitions since this was just experimentation to see if it worked.

I still want to try hddreport and testing the RAIDs with some of the other controllers.

Thanks for the suggestions and help.

[jaesonk]

Originally Posted by thomas

@jaesonk: please run this program and attach the report here: http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online.../hddreport.lha

I tried hddreport earlier today on my DraCo. Each time it crashes when it gets to querying dracodisk.device. I think that's for the floppy drive. The hard drives use dracoscsi.device.

[thomas]

Add IGNORE=dracodisk.device to the icon's tooltypes or the command line if you run it from the shell.