Here's some things I've been wondering about. When you're setting up a hard drive, is it necessary to install a boot block if you don't plan to ever boot from the drive? The other question is about chip RAM. How much of the RAM is chip RAM? Is it all chip RAM or is it just the RAM on your video card? I know the RAM types have become blurred on gen 2 Amigas.

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X5000 / microA1(OS4.1 FE U2) / CodeBench / Imagine / Blender
Lightwave 2019 / Microsoft Visual C++

@thinkchip

You cannot install a boot block on a hard disk, you never could. There is a flag "bootable" in the partition table. Nothing else is needed to make a partition bootable. If you don't want to boot from the partition you usually don't set this flag.

IIRC all RAM in OS4 is flagged as Chip-RAM as well as Fast-RAM, just because there is no need to use Chip-RAM for gfx on the new hardware, but some legacy software fails if it cannot allocate Chip-RAM.

The RAM on the video card is not visible as RAM to applications. Only the gfx driver (Picasso96) knows about the video RAM.

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Email: thomas-rapp@web.de
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Sorry, maybe I'm thinking of the wrong thing. In "Media Toolbox" there is an "install" function. I copies boot code to the hard drive. I think what I'm wondering is if it's safe to use the hard drive without "installing" it.

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X5000 / microA1(OS4.1 FE U2) / CodeBench / Imagine / Blender
Lightwave 2019 / Microsoft Visual C++

@thinkchip

That boot block would be for the SLB on UBoot machines. (Second level booter.) You can use a HDD without installing it fine. You just won't be able to boot from it on an AmigaOne machine before the X series. Unless you have another drive in the same machine with an SLB in the boot block. UBoot loads and boots it when it locates it during the auto boot process. The X series don't support it and must load the SLB type binary manually as a file.

Chip ram has been blurred since the 90's when Amiga got RTG. The Vampire blurs it further. Since there is chip ram and video ram which some see as the same thing without knowing the technical difference.

Last edited by Hypex on 24-Apr-2019 at 06:20 PM.

@thomas

Quote:

some legacy software fails if it cannot allocate Chip-RAM.

Try adding chipram=2 to the setpatch command in your startup-sequence eg.

SetPatch QUIET ADDCHIPRAM=2

From SetPatch help:

The ADDCHIPRAM option can be used on non-classic machines for
backwards compatibility to old broken programs which peek system
structures which were always declared as private, to be used by
the operating system only. It installs an old-style MemHeader in
SysBase->MemList. Note: You dont need to activate this
compatibility hack for programs which simply want to allocate some
ChipRAM.

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