[comp.sys.atari.st] HD woes, and how about documentation?

braner@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (braner) (01/15/88)

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Here is a warning to all ye hackers out there:

I tried the Supra hard disk driver SW on my Atari SH204 as it came
formatted from the factory.  IT WORKED FINE.  Then I got brave and
installed the Supra hard disk boot.  DRIVE C DIED.  I could not
fix it, even by zeroing C:, even with SUPEDIT.PRG.  This may or may
not have anything to do with the fact that I used to have HDB2.3
hard disk boot installed.  (I disabled that before installing the
Supra HD boot, but the HD sector editor in SUPEDIT showed sector 0
to have both "AHDI.PRGhahn" and "SUPBOOT.SYS" in there...)
Anyway, it's all my fault, of course.

So I had to reformat the drive.  Surprisingly, both the Atari and the
Supra SW refused to format just partition C:, without clobbering D:
and E: --- is there a way to do that?  (It works fine now.)

I could have fixed the C partition if I knew what is supposed to be
where on it.  The C: partition boot sector seemed messed up (using
SUPEDIT) but filling up the fields with the parameters I saw in
the D: and E: partitions did not fix it.  Any source of information
out there about HD boot/FAT/directory info?

Just for the record, here is what SUPEDIT claims is in my boot sectors now
(with the standard 4-6-10 meg partitioning):  (all numbers in HEXADECIMAL)

	branch:		4
	filler:		><~aNu	(that 'a' is an alpha)
	serial:		244865
	BPS:		200
	SPC:		2
	RES:		1
	NFATS:		20
	NDIRS:		100
	NSECTS:		2290, 3000, 5000 for partitions C, D, E
	media:		73
	SPF:		12, 19, 29 for partitions C, D, E
	SPT:		2E70
	NSIDES:		2C73
	NHID:		2076
	evenout:	2F7C, 1B0C, EB0C for partitions C, D, E
	checksum:	0

- Moshe Braner

PS: still in need of the patch that enables reading the hard disk
GEM partitions from MS-DOS under PC-Ditto.