Partition big drives on a GS ?

["Mark Cummings" <NOTfigjams@primus.com.au>]

I just bought a 500M & 1.2G Quantum SCSI drive for my GS. Enough room to
swing a cat. Settle down Q.C. :)
Played with the 500M drive on the Mac first using Apple HDSC and no
problems. Loaded System 7.6.1 off CD and booted it up fine. Then tried the
1.2G...
Set it up in an external SCSI case. Tried every formating program I could
lay my computers on.

1. Mac using Apple HDSC - Successfully formatted a whole 1.2G Mac volume,
didn't bother loading any O/S as it looked like a sure thing. Then tried to
do mixed Prodos/HFS vols. By about the 3rd option I tried, HDSC messed up
the partition map, and wouldn't fix it. I couldn't even rename the volume,
but that turned out to be "sharing..." setup. turned off sharing, but HDSC
refused to allow me to reconfigure the drive. Tried all options.

2. Mac - Drive setup, won't run on my non Power-PC, 68K Mac.

3. Mac - Disk Utils, said the partition map was faulty (I think), or at
least that the drive was.

4. IIGS - Chinook Utils, can only set 7 partitions of 32MB, and reads the
info all wrong off the drive. Lots of "?" marks.

5. IIGS - AHS SCSI Utils (HDSC), can only set 4 partitions of 32MB, so I
didn't bother.

6. IIGS - ADU wouldn't run off the floppy because I didn't have SCSI driver
installed. Installed that, then proceeded to partition the drive, got to
number 8 and the "NEW" drive button was greyed out. So I stopped at 8, I
should have been able to go to 32 x 32MB for this beast, and the manual says
so for >1GB drives. Anyway settled for 8 and made the last one 1GB, then it
formattted all as ProDOS because HFS.FST wasn't installed on the boot
floppy.
When the desktop came up, the 1G partition was only 32M. I expected that
from ProDOS, couldn't reformat as HFS yet.
Tried to add HFS.FST to the SCSI boot floppy, not enough room.
Tried to make a brand spanker using the /Install using 800K floppy option
with bare minumum SCSI + HFS.FST. Not enough room. Made the bare minimum
800K no SCSI or HFS.FST. deleted Basic.System & 5.25 driver. Tried to add
SCSI & HFS.FST, still not enough room. Made a copy of the /system disk and
deleted 5.25 driver and Basic.System & added SCSI & HFS.FST to that. Finally
I have a SCSI/HFS boot floppy. Hoo bloody ray!!! None of this is explained
in the System 6 Manual, you have to "jump through the hoops" to fix it
yourself.
Booted the SCSI/HFS floppy. ran ADU off the other drive on /SystemTools1.
tried to reconfigure the partitions, but still only 8 allowed. Why ???. At
least I was able to make the big one a HFS partition this time.

Ran the /setup on the 1st partition with all the bells and whistles
installed. Rebooted and tadaaa... it works.

So I am left wondering how on earth have others done this before, and why
can't I have more than 8 partitions ?
My 500M Focus was quite happy with 17 partition, so why can't I get >8 with
this 1.2G drive. Is it the size of the partition table or something ?
Also why did the Mac spit the dummy with the drive, and will I ever be able
to put it back there ?
You can understand why I'm not in a hurry to do that, as it took me sooooo
long to get it up on the GS.

Mark
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