Re: [hatari-devel] HD drive & partition limits (was: ACSI hard drive emulation)

[Eero Tamminen <oak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On tiistai 24 kesäkuu 2014, Adam Klobukowski wrote:
> 2014-06-24 13:04 GMT+02:00 Thomas Huth <th.huth@xxxxxx>
> > > > How big was your hard disk image, which TOS version did you try to
> > > > use and what's your host system? (Linux? Windows? 32-bit? 64-bit?)
> > > 
> > > 8GB and 4GB under Linux x64.
> > 
> > Ok, so you likely do not have a problem with a 32-bit host (HD images
> > could be limited to 2 or 4 GB there).

According to HD driver FAQ:
	http://hddriver.seimet.de/en/faq.html

ST/STE HW limit is 1GB:
"With the ACSI bus of the ST/STE mass storage devices with a capacity > 1 
GiB can only be used with their full capacity with suitable host adapters or 
memory card adapters."


> I think I tried 1GB too.

What sized partitions you used?

Partition max size limits are following for different TOS versions:
- TOS >= 4.x: 1024MB
- TOS >=1.04:  512MB
- older TOS:   256MB

Did you make *really* sure that partition content was using
correct FAT16 format?  Note also that some TOS versions corrupt
data on drives with VFAT directory entries.

MiNT & MagiC support FAT32 & ext2 partitions which don't have
these limits, but you need to boot them from smaller FAT16
partition on C:.


> > > > Can someone please share an empty working image?
> > > > There is a sample image available on the hatari website:
> > > > 
> > > > http://hatari.tuxfamily.org/hd80mb.image.gz
> > > 
> > > Thanks, but I need something bigger :/
> > 
> > Ok, would 1 GB be sufficient? If yes, I'd recommend starting with that
> > size. I doubt that AHDI can handle bigger partitions, since the initial
> > ACSI bus specification had a limit to that size with the addressing
> > mode.
> 
> Yep, it should be enough.

Btw. Why do you need such a large image file
instead of using GEMDOS HD emulation...?


	- Eero

PS. If you use EmuTOS, you don't need HD driver nor partition
table.  EmuTOS can directly use drives with DOS partition table
or drive with just single FAT partition (many memory cards used
as HDs on real Atari machines aren't partitioned, they have
just single FAT partition).

Those are much easier to create.