On this page you find a list of questions which are partially dealt with in
the HDDRIVER manual but nevertheless are asked quite regularly.
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Do I lose any data when switching from another driver to
HDDRIVER?
No, all existing data remain unchanged when installing HDDRIVER. Drives
with partitions created by old versions of the ICD driver software, which used a non-standard partitioning scheme, require a special treament. In this case data have to be
converted with software that is included in the HDDRIVER distribution. No data
are lost by this operation.
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What is the upper limit for the capacity of a hard disk drive connected to the Atari?
With HDDRIVER one can use drives with a capacity of up to 2 TByte (2048 GByte) with the TT and Falcon. With the ACSI bus of an ST/STE drives larger than one GByte can only be used with their full capacity with ICD compatible host adapters like the LINK96 or LINK97.
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What is the upper limit for the partition size or the size of a bootable partition?
The maximum partition size depends on the version of TOS and on the
filesystem. TOS 1.0x supports partitions of up to 256 MB, TOS 1.6x/2.0x/3.0x of up to 512 MB, TOS 4.0x of up to 1 GB. These sizes are also valid for bootable partitions and TOS/Windows compatible partitions. MiNT and MagiC support filesystems that do not have any relevant restriction on their size.
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For my 400 GByte drive HDDRUTIL reports a capacity of only 380 GByte.
In contrast to some hard disk vendors HDDRUTIL calculates with 1024 bytes per KByte instead of only 1000 bytes per KByte. As a result the capacity displayed by HDDRUTIL can be considerably less than advertized by the vendor, especially with huge drives.
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What are the capabilities of HDDRIVER with respect to
exchanging data with other platforms?
With HDDRIVER data can be exchanged without any additional software
between the Atari and DOS/Windows/Linux PCs as well as Macs. Note that you cannot boot from a media used for exchanging data.
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How do I profit from the support of CF and SD adapters?
CF and SD adapters, particularly for the IDE port, are cheap, and they provide for noiseless work without a harddisk drive. One can even boot from a CF or SD card. Naturally one can also read data like digital photos this way or conveniently exchange data with other platforms. Current CF and SD cards offer the same speed with the Atari as regular hard disk drives.
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Which SCSI drives can be connected to the Atari?
In general any SCSI drive can be used, as long as it has an
8 bit SCSI interface. Other drives (e. g Ultra Wide drives) require
an adapter that reduces the bus width from 16 to 8 bit. These
adapters are no special Atari equipment and are available in specialist
shops.
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HDDRIVER and HDDRUTIL do not recognize my SCSI drive connected to the ST/STE.
ST and STE do not have a real SCSI bus but only Atari's proprietary ACSI
bus, which results in some restrictions. Some devices can only be
used with the LINK96 or LINK97 host adapters. Only these adapters have
an SCSI ID of their own. Additionally, when using other adapters it may
be necessary to switch off the drive's parity checking.
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Each time when booting HDDRIVER (and HDDRUTIL as well) reports a different ID for my IDE/ATAPI drive.
IDE and ATAPI devices connected to the Atari should not be operated in the Cable Select mode, but should be explicitly jumpered either as master or slave drive.
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How does HDDRIVER support new Atari compatible hardware?
HDDRIVER itself will not support any hardware interface that is not fully
compatible with the interfaces of the ST, TT or
Falcon030. An exception is the second IDE port of the Hades, the Milan and the Suska-III-C board, which is directly supported by HDDRIVER. Nevertheless, provisions have been made in case there should
ever be Atari clones with new interfaces. HDDRIVER can be used
with any interface for which a SCSI driver is available. Developers of
new interface hardware thus have to provide a SCSI driver for their
hardware. This has already been done successfully for the Milan's
PCI SCSI bus. HDDRIVER itself includes SCSI drivers for Atari ACSI,
Atari SCSI, Atari/Milan IDE and Atari/Milan ATAPI.
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Is there anything to consider when using Cubase Audio?
Cubase Audio does not handle the Falcon's SCSI bus compliant to the standard, which can lead to problems with HDDRIVER 8. The only work-around is using the last version 7.93 of the HDDRIVER 7 series. This version does not support as many peripherals as HDDRIVER 8 but is known to work with Cubase. Registered users of HDDRIVER 8 can request HDDRIVER 7.93 for free by e-mail.