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Unable to free up space on a full hard drive


Nebulon

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Has anyone found a patch or good work-around for full hard drives locking themselves out in AmigaDOS 2.x and 3.x?

 

I'm referring to the annoying issue that's outlined here:

https://archive.org/stream/Amiga_Release_2_Getting_Started_1991_Commodore#page/n19/mode/2up

 

 

I love AmigaDOS/WB 2.x and 3.x, but this is one 'feature' that really burns me.

 

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How large a drive is it? anything over 4gb runs a high probability of writing over other partitions or going corrupt giving the full drive situation. The system drive should be no larger than 800mb. Transferring large files will also corrupt the drive in the older workbench OS as the transfer file size is limited.

There are no good fixes other than copying the files to another drive that is formatted and partitioned properly or formatting and reinstalling everything to the existing drive.

Edited by Tonyvdb
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Hmmm.... It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure I ran into that same problem with 100 MB drives. The biggest drives I used back I the day were 1GB hard drives.

 

I ran into that issue using 3.5" disks too -- the same issue that the Amiga release 2 manual mentions. You'd think that the file system would intentionally leave just enough room to validate the last file. Kind of like a "the disk's full" when it's actually as full as you can get while still leaving room to validate the disk. It sounds almost like an oversight to me -- one that slipped out the door and should have been fixed in the next incremental version if not in 3.0).

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It has been fixed if using the updated files that come with 3.9 BB4 and there are patches for 3.1 that also help. The biggest problem is the old file system FFS its horable at handling large files and often will cause issues. PFS and SFS file systems are much better.

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It has been fixed if using the updated files that come with 3.9 BB4 and there are patches for 3.1 that also help. The biggest problem is the old file system FFS its horable at handling large files and often will cause issues. PFS and SFS file systems are much better.

Ooh! A patch for 3.1?

 

If you know where I can find that, please let me know. My Amiga 4000 could certainly use it.

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Yes, thats an option or you can go to www.amigakit.com they sell new install floppy discs for OS 3.1 that has all the new files.

 

Ideally you want to do a clean install of the OS in order to do it right. You want to patch over to Either SFS or PFS as the harddrive format as well to eliminate issues caused by using FFS.

 

You can find many of these patches on aminet.net

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I don't know the answer but I may have something you can try if you have the right things.

 

You'll need to connect the Amiga to pc with a null modem serial connection.

 

You'll need Amiga explorer which is available for free from Cloanto.

 

You'll need a bootable workbench disk.

 

And the part of the puzzle I can't fix for you unless you have access to another Amiga or you get the coms working straight away...that you can put the Amiga explorer on from a pc or the web. You'll need the Amiga version of Amiga explorer on Amiga formatted floppy. If you get the con ports working right away, the pc Amiga explorer can install on the Amiga by right clicking the ae icon on pc and selecting setup.

 

Connect Amiga and pc set com posts to 19200, 8n1, rts/cts (hardware).

Boot off floppy.

Run Amiga explorer on pc and setup on Amiga.

Once connected and browsing, you can drag the hard drive image of your system from the Amiga side to the pc side.

 

Once that is complete you should be able to mount your hdd in emulation as another hdd then access it directly from a working boit partition and remove files that way.

 

When done, you can test by trading to boot from it in emulation. If that works, copy the virtual gdd file from pc back to the Amiga via Amiga explorer.

 

This is all theoretical but it makes sense logically and as far as I can tell should definitely work.

 

It just depends if the virtual hdd is accessible in emulation.

Edited by Sinphaltimus
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  • 5 months later...

I don't know the answer but I may have something you can try if you have the right things.

 

You'll need to connect the Amiga to pc with a null modem serial connection.

 

You'll need Amiga explorer which is available for free from Cloanto.

 

You'll need a bootable workbench disk.

 

And the part of the puzzle I can't fix for you unless you have access to another Amiga or you get the coms working straight away...that you can put the Amiga explorer on from a pc or the web. You'll need the Amiga version of Amiga explorer on Amiga formatted floppy. If you get the con ports working right away, the pc Amiga explorer can install on the Amiga by right clicking the ae icon on pc and selecting setup.

 

Connect Amiga and pc set com posts to 19200, 8n1, rts/cts (hardware).

Boot off floppy.

Run Amiga explorer on pc and setup on Amiga.

Once connected and browsing, you can drag the hard drive image of your system from the Amiga side to the pc side.

 

Once that is complete you should be able to mount your hdd in emulation as another hdd then access it directly from a working boit partition and remove files that way.

 

When done, you can test by trading to boot from it in emulation. If that works, copy the virtual gdd file from pc back to the Amiga via Amiga explorer.

 

This is all theoretical but it makes sense logically and as far as I can tell should definitely work.

 

It just depends if the virtual hdd is accessible in emulation.

 

You just gave me an idea and I think it might work.

 

Connecting to the Amiga using a parallel cable and the PC2Amiga utility could do the trick since you can delete Amiga files from the PC side.

 

If I run into a full drive issue in the future, I'll give this a try.

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