I recently bought a 4.3Gb hard drive for my Amiga. However, I can not format it to the full 4Gb, is there anything I can do to allow me to do this?

The problem is not with your hard drive but your Amiga. Like the old MS-DOS machines, AmigaOS imposes a limit of 4Gb on one partition. Whilst it is not as restrictive as the 512Mb limit it can still be a pain. This is caused because AmigaDOS locates blocks on a disk using a 32 bit address.

The easiest way of fixing this is simply to format hard drives with partitions smaller than 2Gb. However, if you really want a 4Gb partition there are a number of patches available, such as FFSTD64, giga.device, or Amiga International's beta version of an updated file system. The first two are available from Aminet whilst the AI update is available from their website. Please remember that these are only patches and may possibly cause some problems with your current setup.

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