ACA500plus - any extra steps needed to use full capacity of CF card?

Busta Uppa · Aug 25th 2022

I have recently set up Workbench on a 32GB Boot card via the built-in installer, and have been testing out a few WHDLoad games. Before I go crazy with the WHDLoad installs, I want to make sure I'm all set up to use the full capacity of my CF card.

Workbench currently lists the following:

WB3.1 3% full, 458M free, 14M in use

And for my Aux card:

BC5C-F92D 0% full, 3,694M free, 25M in use

Not sure exactly how this should look on an Amiga, but that reading on the boot card especially looks a bit small. Should I be creating a partition or anything like that, in order to use the full 32GB on these cards? As I understand, there used to be a 4GB limit on the boot cards, but in other threads I've seen it explained that the ACA500plus gets around this.

Thanks for your time!

Busta Uppa · Aug 26th 2022

quick correction for accuracy - my CF cards are 64 GB, not 32 GB (I think it's too late to edit my original post, sorry )

Jens · Aug 26th 2022

Please note that only handling of media>4GB has been patched to work in this version of OS3.1 that our installer is giving you. The display of empty/used space is NOT fixed, and still suffers from the 32-bit limitation. Rest assured that you can use the full capacity, despite the broken display. Both the file system, and the block driver ("device" on an Amiga) are 64-bit aware, and they even speak both 64-bit dialects called NSD64 and TD64.

That's just a limitation we live with. The other possibility is to get OS3.2 from our shop, but that's a pretty steep price if you're "only" after fixing the capacity display.

Busta Uppa · Aug 27th 2022

that is great to hear - thank you for the clarification!!

Busta Uppa · Sep 6th 2022

Sorry to bump this post, but I seem to be running into the displayed storage limit on WB3.1 after all. When attempting to extract .lha files now, I am getting a WB3.1 "disk full" message and have to cancel the operation (with about 472MB in use on a 64GB card).

Understand that you cannot provide DOpus support, but is it possible that DOpus could be limited by the way WB displays free space?

Or perhaps is there already another partition on the Boot card that I'm not seeing? For reference, I did use the built-in Workbench installer on the ACA500plus to prepare the boot card.

Timm · Sep 6th 2022

You should see a Work: partition as well. The vast majority of the free space on the CF card of that size goes into the Work: partition, while the WB: partition will be capped at around ~500MB. So the displayed size for the WB: partition appears accurate. What bothers me is that you didn't mention a Work: partition.

Maybe the installation procedure was not capable of creating a Work: partition of almost 64GB.

The biggest I have tested was a 16GB card. Please note that while we understand that it's increasingly difficult to find smaller CF cards, 64GB is an insane amount of space for a computer as small as an Amiga 500 with a 68000 CPU.

Are you running on a plain 68000 CPU? With any kind of accelerator card that brings extra memory there are no problems to be expected during installation even with a 64GB card.

Busta Uppa · Sep 7th 2022

Ahhh yes, the Work "drawer" is right there in plain sight! I didn't realize it was a full-on partition, and in fact what I should be using for all my Boot card storage.

Looks like this is what DOpus refers to as "CF1:," so now I'm moving a bunch of stuff there. So far the free space on CF1: is perpetually being reported as 3.9GB, which seems in line with the explanations provided earlier.

Well I feel a bit silly, nothing to see here, move along. Thanks again, support team!