Free up Drive Letters / Deactivate Partitions

[samperna]

Hello All,

I have searched here, AtariAge, Atari Forum and Google without finding an answer.

I am using HD Driver 9.08

I have partitioned a 4 gig SSD into eight 500mb partitions. All work well. I'd like to use four of the partitions all the time and deactivate the remaining four partitions (to free up drive letters) when using my Cosmos Ex or Gigafile or CD-ROM drive. How do I accomplish this?

Please help me find this solution.

Thanks,

Sam

[uweseimet]

Hi,

You can use "Edit Partitions" (HDDRUTIL) to enable/disable partitions. (Also see the HDDRIVER manual.) Note that TOS requires a reboot for such a change to be become effective.
Depending on your system environment, Big-DOS may also be a a good solution. With HDDRIVER and Big-DOS you can have up to 31 partitions (A:-Z: except U:, and 1:-6:). With MagiC or MiNT you can also use more than 16 partitions.
For optical drives, as long as you do not want to create regular TOS-compatible partitions on them (which you can with DVD and BD drives without any special driver software except HDDRIVER), drive letters are usually > P: (typically Z:).
Finally, in some cases it can be useful to configure HDDRIVER to uses A: and B: for partitions. But this setup is a bit tricky, also see the HDDRIVER manual. See the attached image, where the first (and only) partition of the second UltraSatan drive is mapped to B:, which saves you one of the regular hard disk drive letters.

By the way, note that HDDRIVER 9.09 is the latest version.

Take care

Uwe

[samperna]

You make HD Driver one of the best Atari purchases I have ever made thank you.

I appreciate you response and patient education.

I did not know reboot was required. Nor did I think about a TOS partition on disc was possible.

I will look for BigDOS.

Sincere Gratitude,

Sam

[samperna]

I have been unable to get the partitions to deactivate.

I have attached a Flickr link to photos of my attempt to deactivate and the boot screen showing all eight partitions are active. I'm certain I'm missing a step.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/samperna/shares/2P93vR

Thanks for helping.

:-)

Sam

[uweseimet]

Looks as if your memory card has been partitioned TOS/Windows compatible. Deactivating partitions only works with purely TOS compatible drives. I might be able to change this in future versions of HDDRUTIL, but I cannot tell yet.
So the only recommendation I can give is to use a plain TOS compatible memory card.

One more note: You should disable all device IDs where no devices are connected to in the "Devices and Partitions" dialog. This way the "No device found" messages will vanish, and booting is faster because unused IDs are not checked for devices anymore.

[samperna]

Cool, I understand. I will create a TOS only drive.

Hooray! Thank you.

Sam

[uweseimet]

In general, never use TOS/WIndows compatible partitions if you do not need them for exchanging data with the Atari and PCs oder Macs. Go for purely TOS compatible partitions whenever possible.

[samperna]

Thank you, I am returning to Atari computing after a kong absence. Your guidance is sincerely appreciated and highly regarded.

:-)

Sam