Technical information

© Jean Louis-Guérin – V1.2a – September 2014 Page 21 / 69
4.4.3 Configuring the HDDRIVER Hard Disk Driver
Run the HDDRUTIL.APP. The hddriver.sys driver of the boot partition is automatically selected for
you. With HDDRIVER 9.x most of the default values required for CosmosEx, and UltraSatan users
are already set to what you want.
4.4.3.1 Devices & Partitions managed by HDDRIVER
 From the Settings menu select the Devices and
Partitions… command. You are presented a window with the
Devices and Partitions options. Make sure that all devices 0.x
are checked (other might be checked too). This will ensure
that all ACSI devices (with IDs from 0 to 7) are handled by
HDDRIVER.
4.4.3.2 Removable Medium Drive Support
The HDDRIVER driver supports removable media drives. When
the media is changed, the driver recognizes this the next time
the drive is accessed. If the new card has more partitions than
the previous, these are added after the currently logged
partitions. To support removable medium you need to set the minimum number of partitions and sector
size (see Important Parameters for Removable Drive).
Run the HDDRUTIL.APP. From the
Settings menu select the Removable
Media… command.
You are presented a window with the Removable media options.
Set the Drive ID to reserve to the maximum number of
partitions to be expected on any of the media you plan to use.
Set also the maximum sector size to the larger value for all the
partitions on all the media.
4.4.4 Accessing DOS Partitions
HDDRIVER can directly access FAT16A partitions of less than 32 Mbytes.
When used with BigDOS the HDDRIVER allows access to FAT16B partitions of up to 2GB.
4.4.5 Accessing TOS & Windows Partitions
HDDRIVER allows access to TOS & Windows partitions created by HDDRIVER.
 Important Warning: never try to access TOS&DOS partitions created by PPDRIVER hard disk driver
with HDDRIVER as they are not compatible.
Remember that with TOS 1.04 the size of the partitions is limited to 512MB. It is possible to create
several TOS & Windows partitions on a SD card with HDDRIVER. All these partitions can be accessed
by the TOS on Atari and by Windows on a PC.
4.4.6 Special Care to boot from device other than ACSI ID0
If the device you want to boot from is not on ACSI ID0 you have to be very careful. Suppose you want
to boot from an USB memory stick found on ACSI ID1. Just follow the standard procedure described in
section 4.4.1. Reboot the system load the HDD driver and run the HDDUTIL. Install the driver on the
first partition of the drive as described in 4.4.2 and immediately before you reboot enable all devices
as described in 4.4.3.1. This will ensure that your device at ID1 will be seen correctly by HDD. You
probably also want to mount this partition as C drive. By default ID0 device will get a reserved mount
letter C. To change this you need to modify the order the HDD
driver will scan the boot devices. In the Devices and
Partitions form drag and drop the 0.1 entry on top of the 0.0
entry. This will force HDD to scan ID1 before ID0 and therefore
the boot partition of the drive found at ACSI ID1 will be
mounted as C.