Upgrading to 12.x

[peters]

Hello,

When upgrading an existing HD driver installation from 11.y to 12.x does it remain as MBR or is it converted to GPT ?

I am assuming it stays as MBR until the drive is partitioned again.

[uweseimet]

Installing HDDRIVER only installs the driver, but does not touch anything else. The settings of the previously installed version are retained, the previous HDDRIVER.SYS is moved to HDDRIVER.OLD, as a backup of the previous configuration.

[peters]

Thanks, I thought that would be the case. Converting to gpt is probably a bit tricky.

[uweseimet]

It's tricky because you would have to move all data away from the first sectors of a drive. This means that you would have to move all data on the first partition. Unless you also move the other partitions, the first partition gets smaller, which is an issue if all sectors are already in use.
I doubt that there is any tool for any platform that does this conversion. If there is no free disk space at all, converting would fail, because you definitely need some space for the GPT and its backup. The backup GPT at the end of the medium is mandatory. This is nice, because it is very unlikely that when you lose data the first *and* the last sectors of your drive are affected. So usually the chances of recovering the partition data are quite good.
HDDRUTIL can recover the GPT from its backup, but you can also use other tools, because GPTs are platform independent. This is why you can also use HDDRUTIL to recover the GPT of your PC or Mac.
The GPT page of the HDDRIVER website has more details on GPTs. Some time ago I repartitioned my TT drive, and since then it uses a GPT.

[peters]

I think fdisk can do it provided there is space, as you point out.

I don't think fdisk had been ported to mint.

https://superuser.com/questions/495672/ ... ss-of-data

[uweseimet]

No, fdisk cannot *convert* MBRs to GPTs. It can only create these partition schemes, similar to what partitioning does with HDDRUTIL. It does not even know about filesystems.
I don't think porting fdisk to MiNT is that useful, because partitioning a drive with regular Atari tools, in particular with HDDRUTIL, is much more convenient.

[peters]

I suppose if the user backed-up the first partition, the first partition could be deleted and a smaller one created (without affecting the other partitions).

This would allow the space for GPT to be created.

Still not trivial.

I must have about 80G of apps and data so copying it takes days if I have to erase the whole hd.

[uweseimet]

Sure, but this requires manual intervention of a user who knows what she/he is doing. A tool capable of converting an MBR scheme to a GPT scheme would have to take care of this automatically. Not only the first, but also the last partition has to be touched, by the way. This is because there must always be a copy of the complete GPT at the end of the medium in order for a GPT scheme to be valid.
But this is nothing specific to HDDRIVER or the Atari. It's the same with any other platform. Usually there is no need to do such a conversion with an existing drive that does not have to be partitioned anyway.

[peters]

I currently have 2 drives that are partitioned to less than 128GB to avoid the issue with larger drives.

One advantage of converting to GPT is that they could be resized on a Linux box.

[uweseimet]

But only if the tool you use for that knows how to deal with TOS FAT16 partitions. These are not identical with Windows FAT16 partitions, which is the main issue that affects exchanging data. It's not just the MBR that's different, but also the data in the boot sectors.
Just for the sake of completeness: The boot sector data do not depend on whether a drive has an MBR or GPT partition scheme. The partition scheme and the boot sector data are independent.