HDDRIVER news are offered as RSS and Atom feeds. You can find information on changes in previous releases in the overview of changes and in the HDDRIVER forum.
September 10th, 2018: HDDRIVER 10.13 is available
- HDDRUTIL: The device check did not free all SCSI Driver handles. This has been fixed.
Users of HDDRIVER 10.0 can download the free upgrade to HDDRIVER 10.1.
May 5th, 2018: HDDRIVER 10.12 is available
- HDDRIVER: Fixed a bug in the SCSI emulation for IDE drives, related to the handling of invalid LUNs.
- HDDRUTIL: Clicking on "Save" in the HDDRUTIL preferences dialog saves the preferences and closes the dialog. The "Save Preferences Now" button has been removed.
- HDDRUTIL: The "Partition" dialog displays the byte swapping status.
February 4th, 2018: HDDRIVER 10.11 is available
The most important changes since HDDRIVER 9.1
- HDDRIVER: With the integrated SCSI Driver not only SCSI drives but now also IDE and SATA hard disk drives > 2 TiB can be addressed with their full capacity.
- HDDRIVER: The SCSI emulation for IDE drives supports READ/WRITE/VERIFY (16) and READ CAPACITY (16).
- HDDRIVER: Improved mapping of IDE to SCSI error codes.
- HDDRIVER: Up to 15% higher IDE transfer rates compared to all previous versions.
- HDDRIVER: Faster byte-swapping.
- HDDRIVER: The SCSI Driver does not convert the ATAPI/SATA packet commands READ/WRITE (6) to READ/WRITE (10) anymore. These commands are now passed through unchanged.
- HDDRIVER: Further size optimizations. HDDRIVER 10 is the most compact HDDRIVER since HDDRIVER 6.
- HDDRIVER: Timeouts are now dynamically calculated, based on the number of bytes to be transferred.
- HDDRIVER: Support for UEFI GUID partition tables (GPT), for details see the README file and the HDDRIVER forum.
- HDDRIVER/HDDRUTIL: Support for the "Reduced Block Commands" command set (RBC), for devices with limited features.
- HDDRIVER/HDDRUTIL: HDDRIVER.SYS can be installed in Alternate RAM by enabling the corresponding option in the "File->Preferences" dialog. This in particular makes sense for Ataris with Fast RAM and IDE interface, in order to increase the IDE transfer rate. Additionally, it saves ST-RAM. Note that hard disk drivers that reside in Alternate RAM cannot be booted from the ACSI bus.
- HDDRUTIL: Support for 64 bit sector numbers.
- HDDRUTIL: The functions for erasing, copying, loading, saving and testing sectors support media > 2 TiB.
- HDDRUTIL: When loading or saving media images as well as when testing sectors the start sector and the number of sectors can be specified.
- HDDRUTIL: In order to better support additional buses a new window with a list of all available buses has been added.
- HDDRUTIL: All windows can be closed. Whether they are open or closed can be toggled in the new "Windows" menu.
- HDDRUTIL: The device check sorts buses by their SCSI Driver ID.
- HDDRUTIL: With "Scan Bus" only the selected bus is scanned for devices.
- HDDRUTIL: When a bus, device or drive is selected all corresponding buses devices and drives are marked.
- HDDRUTIL: If possible the capacity of a device/medium is displayed in the device window.
- HDDRUTIL: "Device Information" displays whether the SCSI Driver supports all SCSI command classes for this device.
- HDDRUTIL: The new function "Medium Details" displays details for the selected mass storage medium.
- HDDRUTIL: Improved capacity usage with Windows and TOS/Windows compatible partitioning.
- HDDRUTIL: When partitioning TOS or TOS/Windows compatible media in sector mode there is no automatic adjustment of partition boundaries anymore. The sector mode is meant to only be used by experts.
- HDDRUTIL: HDDRUTIL makes use of the REPORT LUNS command, if supported by a device, in order to optimize the check for available LUNs.
- HDDRUTIL: "Show Details" also displays XHDI-related information about the selected drive.
- HDDRUTIL: Partitioning does not anymore require an XHDI compatible driver to be installed, SCSI Driver compatibility is sufficient.
- HDDRUTIL: Improved Windows compatibility of FAT32 partitions created by HDDRUTIL.
- HDDRUTIL: With "Devices and Partitions" unknown GUID types can be mapped to the XHDI RAW type.
- HDDRUTIL: The new menu item "Check Boot Sector" checks whether a partition is compatible with the currently running operating system and the current XHDI limits. It displays the boot sector parameters and, in brackets, the limits. Parameters that are not compatible with the limits are displayed disabled. Affected partitions may require a newer version of TOS or software like Big-DOS in order to be usable.