exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I have an STM and an STFM and am in the process of adding an ACSI2STM hard disk emulator.

There are a couple of questions:

1) What is the largest partition that I can use?
2) What is the largest bootable partition that I can use?

Some articles suggest that I can use a 232 Mb boot partition plus other larger non-bootable. Whereas in other places it suggests that 32 Mb is the largest bootable partition.

Any clarification would be appreciated.

Thanks

Peter

This is the partition size guide from Jookies website, he of Ultrasatan and CosmosEx fame:


Taken from this page: http://joo.kie.sk/?page_id=345

I would also cite PPutnik from here https://atariage.com/forums/topic/28461 ... nt=4148281

long story short, the limit of the boot partition seems to be related to the boot code stored on the MBR, that is read and executed by TOS. So it seems some drivers (I guess HDD driver and PP driver at least) can use 512MB partitions as boot partitions.

Of note also on this post, it is said the 32MB sized partition is the one format that is natively compatible with DOS (FAT16), thus may be useful for exchanging files ?

Yes, I'd agree with what @sporniket said, and it prompted me to go and check one of my machines that uses HDDRIVER, and my C: partition is 512MB and is bootable.

I also set mine up with Windows compatibility, so I can see every partition on the SD card under Windows or MacOS. I know PPeras driver will do the same under Windows, so I assume under MacOS, though I haven't tested it, and I don't have a machine using it at the moment so I can't say re partition sizes like I can for HDDRIVER.

I use PPDrivers and my boot drive is 512MB.

Matt

I use HDDRiver v11.x and 512 meg partitions (including the
boot drive) with TOS v1.4 and up here are perfectly normal.

I think the "legend" limiting the boot partition to 16 MB, 32 MB or 256 MB comes from times when ICD Pro Driver was the unique choice, and was a real limit...

Drivers such as HDDriver and PPutnik let you set a boot partition which is only limited by TOS, i.e. 256 MB for TOS 1.00-TOS 1.02, 512 MB for TOS 1.04-TOS 3.xx and 1024 MB for TOS 4.0x.

I have 2 systems under TOS 2.06 and my boot partitions are 512 MB with HDDriver.

Double checked my Mega 4 that uses IDE and a CF card rather than ACSI and 512MB with HDDRIVER. Not that I think it'd make a difference, just for the extra reference point.