A4000 HD Limits

Greetings Fellow Amiga Fans!

I've been fortunate to pick up an old A4000/040 which I'm in the process of trying to resurrect. Does anyone know what the HD limit is for a system with 3.1 ROMs and "eventually" 3.9 OS?

I'm also in the market for a flicker fixer if anyone knows of some good places to pick one up.

Thanks!

[alexh]

Non. Just the boot partition must start below a certain LBA (Below 2GB?).

SoftHut sells the best A4000 scandoubler the Indivision 4000 and so does RedRumLoa.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by alexh

Non. Just the boot partition must start below a certain LBA (Below 2GB?).

Basically it has to be entirely within the first 4GB on a stock system.

[thomas]

2 TB is an absolute limit which cannot be exceeded yet. (There are 2 TB drives already and technology is progressing faster than ever.)

As already said, with Kickstart 3.1 everything must be within the first 4GB of the drive.

Only after OS 3.9 has finished booting, partitions outside of the first 4GB can be accessed.

Great! I just picked up the 3.1 ROMs off eBay. So, I need to get the OS disks now and an HD. I wish I had kept all of those old HDs from years ago!

I'm going to start with OS 3.1 and once I get a CDROM and hopefully an accelerator, I'll move to 3.9.

What are you guys doing to get your Amigas on the Net? It has been ages since I played in the Amiga space so I'm not sure how that works yet.

Thanks!

Matt

[zipper]

Originally Posted by mbeason

What are you guys doing to get your Amigas on the Net? It has been ages since I played in the Amiga space so I'm not sure how that works yet.

A4000/060 towerized, X-surf III, OS3.9, Genesis, tinkering with installing and settings. Getting about 1.3M speed on my 2 M connection.

Originally Posted by zipper

A4000/060 towerized, X-surf III, OS3.9, Genesis, tinkering with installing and settings. Getting about 1.3M speed on my 2 M connection.

That is so cool! So what network adapter did you use to get it on the network?

Anyone know if I can use any IDE to CF adapter in the A4000? After looking online, the CF card route is cheaper and faster than trying to find an old IDE HD. Also, anyone have a suggestion for a CDROM?

Matt

[zipper]

X-surf cable into my PC router, it worked right away without touching any settings (after fighting 2 days with the software install of X-Surf, which I somehow managed to mess; a reinstall did help).
I have years had a 52x CD-Rom on the A4000 mobo IDE - and mostly use an utility to slow it into 8x to avoid the noise...

[thomas]

Anyone know if I can use any IDE to CF adapter in the A4000?

Any such adapter should work. They are passive after all. It's more difficult to find a compatible CF card. It must identify itself as fixed storage (as opposed to removable). Some brands can be switched by PC software, some are fixed already, most are removable.

Also, anyone have a suggestion for a CDROM?

Any IDE (not SATA) CD/DVD+/-ROM/R/RW should work if the driver software is installed (IDEfix97 or OS 3.5/3.9).

[Shadowfire]

2TB is NOT an absolute limit. The 2TB is a limit imposed by the OS by the use of 32-bit block addresses (2^32 * 512 bytes/block = 2TB).

IDE has had 48-bit block addressing for a while now (they added to the address space when the pevious 28-bit addressing mode met its limits with 128GB drives.) Every drive >128GB supports the 48-bit addressing mode, which will not need another extension for many years.

48-bit addressing supports drives up to 128 petabytes, or more specifically, 144115188075855872 bytes.

Additionally, I have a system which boots off of a single 60gig partition, however it is running a hard disk controller with 64-bit addressing support in ROM (no need to patch it up, so no need to have the boot partition in the first 4GB).

Additionally, I have a system which boots off of a single 60gig partition, however it is running a hard disk controller with 64-bit addressing support in ROM (no need to patch it up, so no need to have the boot partition in the first 4GB).

So, I can use any drive with OS 3.1? I've got a spare 160GB but I'd have to find a solution for anything other than that. I will be moving to OS 3.9 once I have all of the appropriate gear. Right now, I'm just using the base A4000/040.

[thomas]

So, I can use any drive with OS 3.1?

Please note: the OS itself (or more precise the DOS) does not have specific support for harddrives. The size limits for harddrives are dependant on the controller, its firmware and the filesystem software used.

For the internal IDE and SCSI controllers of the A4000, A3000, A1200 and A600 (and most third-party controllers except the latest ones) a harddrive size limit of 4GB applies, thus the boot partitions on these controllers must be within the first 4GB of the drive. You can *connect* drives of any size, though. Just use only the first 4GB.

The boot partition can then load updated drivers which may make it possible to extend the limit to 7.8 GB, 128 GB, 2 TB, 128 PB, depending on versions and methods.

Many software products also have problems with partitions bigger than 2GB, because they treat the number of free bytes as a signed 32 bit number so that more than 2GB appears to be negative.

So with respect to OS 3.1, it *is* possible to use big harddrives, but you should rather try to get a small one, the smallest you can get.