Christian T. Steigies wrote:
That said, maybe there is an atari expert around? I am still trying to convince my Falcon to accept the 40GB IDE disk instead of its 0.4GB SCSI disk, with little luck so far. The disk is/was new, which drivers do I need to load and what tools do I have to use to partition and format the disk, and how do I get a driver onto that disk so that the Atari actually boots from the IDE disk. I've been playing with ahci and hddriver, with little luck. They recognize the disk, but I haven't been able to partition it. I found one old tool, hdx, which lets me start a partitioning, and then asks about a disk type, and none of them is any good for me. In short, I have not been able to create any partitions on the atari yet, nor get the disk detected during boot. Last night I created partitions with atari-fdisk-cross, but that didn't help either. Maybe I have to format them on the PC, too, but isn't the atari able to do that??? Is there a dummy's guide to using a harddisk with an Atari somewhere? Or is this the reason why people used ataris mainly for music?
Since TOS 4.0x is an early-to-mid-90's OS, my guess would be that it (or rather XBIOS or GEMDOS) cannot deal with such large IDE-Disks. I don't think that TOS has ever heard of things like LBA, and the C/H/S geometry of your disk might just blow the XBIOS-limits. TOS will detect the disk during boot and ask for it to send it's geometry, and my guess is, it gets stuck there. I also remember that back in the 90's there used to be a lot of trouble with certain IDE-disks which wouldn't send their geometry but rather expected the PC-BIOS to send it to the disk first (rather peculiar), but that seems to be a problem of the past.
Do you have something like the old "limit to 2,1 GB"-Jumper on the disk? Or, maybe, you can use a PC-Utility to set that limitation "jumperless" That actually might do the trick, since I was successfully operating a 2 GB disk in my (now broken :-() Falcon. Then, you could create a TOS-Partition in the first 2 GB, boot Linux from there (with the "Auto-Geometry Resizing" option compiled in), and use the rest of the disk for Linux.
That's all I know, but maybe it helps...
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Björn Buske
--> bjoern@cubic.org <--