HD Geometry for beginners

[B14ck W01f]

Hello Toni,
From my experience, if I want to emulate an actual Amiga hard drive, I need to make sure that I have the correct size and geometry settings. If i don't, I will get an error like "Error -1 on device open".



How hard would it be to allow WinUAE users to select a real hard drive from a drop down list somewhere on the "CD & Hard Drives" tab, that has options like:


MiniScribe 8425
Toshiba MK-134FA
Rodime RO-3055
etc...


And if users select one of the hard drives, the correct geometry and sizes are shown, and they are not allowed to change any parameters. For example, if the user selects the MiniScribe, then the 4x17x615 will be shown in the geometry boxes, while something around 20.45MB will end up being the size. I think this is a good idea.


Since there are so many hard drives, I am not saying focus on all of them. Set yourself a limit on how many you actually do, say 10.

[Toni Wilen]

If you want to emulate ancient pre-SCSI/IDE HD controllers: You are not and should not be a beginner

In theory it would be good idea because number of ancient drives was quite small but it also should be hidden so that no one accidentally select it because it looks nicer than some plain unnamed SCSI or IDE selection.

Geometry does not matter with IDE or SCSI. (In some edge cases it can if IDE)

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

If you want to emulate ancient pre-SCSI/IDE HD controllers: You are not and should not be a beginner

In theory it would be good idea because number of ancient drives was quite small but it also should be hidden so that no one accidentally select it because it looks nicer than some plain unnamed SCSI or IDE selection.

Geometry does not matter with IDE or SCSI. (In some edge cases it can if IDE)

I recommend looking for the installation disk which came with the A590. It has a drive database file (for use with the original HDToolbox!) on it which contains ready-made configurations for the drives that were known to work at the time. This would include both SCSI and ST506 drives.

Toni is, of course, correct: if you cannot use something like the old HDToolbox drive database, you will be in a world of pain. Prior to the introduction of the Rigid Disk Block standard (ca. 1988) you had to use "DEVS:MountList" files which spelled out exactly how the respective hard disk drive was set up. Every vendor had his own "recipe" for doing so.

If you want to go back to those days (ca. 1986-1987) then you might be best advised to look for old vendor boot disks (Commodore, Microbotics, GVP, etc.). There were numerous such vendors, both small and large in the day.