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

[Eero Tamminen <oak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On torstai 26 kesäkuu 2014, Adam Klobukowski wrote:
> > 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 hoped  Hatari already emulates those 'suitable' host adapters.

No.  Everything Hatari emulates is listed in the documentation:
http://hg.tuxfamily.org/mercurialroot/hatari/hatari/raw-
file/tip/doc/manual.html#Features

If you're considering contributing emulation for host adapter(s)
to Hatari, please go ahead! :-)

(I don't think anybody of current developers has interest
on that, so it needs to come from outside.)


> > > I think I tried 1GB too.
> > 
> > What sized partitions you used?
> 
> 256MB
> 
> > 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:.
> 
> I ws not even close to trying to use VFAT. Usually everything got
> corrupted after I wrote first files on partition.

What you used to format the partition?

Could you try with smaller drive, e.g. 512MB or 256MB,
to find out whether the issue is related to drive size,
and at which point the issue happens.

You might also try latest EmuTOS, and tracing GEMDOS and
HD activity (latest Hatari allows tracing GEMDOS calls
without GEMDOS HD emulation, you just need to enable it
from command line, it cannot be enabled after TOS boots).


> > > > > > 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...?
> 
> Because I want to test something that works only with ACSI.

SW or HW?

(Using Hatari for HW development is understandably rarer,
as it requires modifying Hatari to integrate real HW to
Hatari and using Hatari to emulate just rest of HW.)


	- Eero