[comp.sys.amiga.hardware] My 20Mb drive has MUCH more than 20Mb

muzzle@cs.uq.oz.au (Murray Chapman) (05/03/91)

Hi there

I have a friend who has a 20Mb drive on his A500... it is actually some ancient
IBM PC drive attatched thru a wedgeboard.  It was partitioned into two
"halves": "Brad:" (cyl 0-399) and "Janet:" (cyl 400-611).

We backed up the drive, and tried to install a floppy-partition on the HD
(fmsdis.device).  It didn't work, so we retrieved the old "devs:mountlist"
and did an Amiga-level format to restore the original partition.

Problem: The top 3 cylinders of "Brad:" would not format, and attempting to
format "Janet:" would fail with the message "Error during format: Format 
failed".

We did the obvious thing, and did a low-level format of the drive, which
worked fine (ie all 611 cylinders read-verified).

Again, we couldn't Amiga-format any cylinder above 396...

Now for the funny part: we altered the mountlist to make a single
partition on the HD (cyl 0-396), and formatted that.   According to
AmigaDOS, we have a single partition 20Mb drive (read-verifies ok)
on cylinders 0-396 of a 611 cylinder drive.... we haven't had any problems
with this drive (ie no files lost or mysterious "Disk Full" messages).

I have tried different versions of FFS, format, and hd552x.device, all of which
don't solve the problem!

Anyone out there got any ideas why this is happening????? How can we get
our original partitions back????

Any replies welcome.


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|   | Murray Chapman                          muzzle@cs.uq.oz.au       |   |
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|   | University of Queensland      "I'd rather have a bottle in front |   |
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