Aranym fails to boot hard disk driver from big drive images

[uweseimet]

Aranym fails to boot hard disk drivers (tested with HDDRIVER) from drive images of 500 MB or 50 MB. Images of 5 MB or 512 KB work fine. The same images were tested with Hatari, where all of them were working fine.

[joysfera]

can you share a download link to a highly compressed archive of such (empty) hard drive?

[joysfera]

Also, Uwe, you as the author of HDDRIVER with the complete source code at hand might have an idea what's going on there, don't you?

[joysfera]

Last comment of similar information value as the original bug report: my HDD is 1 GB large and has always booted correctly in ARAnyM.

[uweseimet]

Please see https://www.hddriver.net/aranym.img.gz for a drive image that exhibits this behavior with TOS 4.04. I already discussed this with Thorsten, but there is no resolution yet. Originally I thought this was a byteswapping issue, but then I noticed that the image size may be relevant, or the number of partitions in the image.
The attached image has ACSI/SCSI byte order, i. e. from an Atari IDE perspective it is byteswapped. Hatari can boot from it, but Aranym cannot, regardless of the byteswapping setting, where the correct one would be "Enabled". The image has 6 equal sized partitions, with the HDDRIVER demo version installed on the first partition.

[joysfera]

why have you just closed the issue? Has it resolved automagically?

[uweseimet]

Sorry, I pressed the wrong button, just reopened it.

[paulwratt]

can the hard drive images be (usefully) mounted from linux?
is it a partition limit issue (4 primary partitions, or a presumption about partition table)?
@joysfera number of partitions? types? size of partition table?
@uweseimet same..

[joysfera]

Yes, they can be mounted rather easily nowadays. Some keywords: atari-fdisk, disktype, losetup, partx, ...

BTW, I have just tried it here with my 20+ years old copy of my Falcon disk drive and haven't succeeded. Perhaps it's due to byte swapped data, dunno.

[paulwratt]

the BeeBoxOS Aranym setup uses 2x partition image files, not a single drive image with 2x partitions, so its not useful for this comparison, but it does show that the C: (BGM) partition was setup using linux (ByteSwap=Yes), and the D: (LNX) was setup natively (ByteSwap=No).

Q: is it possible the drive image has a boot partition that is not byte swapped, but the others are (or something funny like that, maybe partition table)?

FYI: I read/saw recently (within the last month) that atari-fdisk mounts an image byte swapped. Theoretically if there is an issue with the drive image it should also show up on the linux side too

[DavidGZ]

By coincidence I hit this issue today. This commit introduced it:
70c9dc4

It only affects TOS+HDDRIVER, with EmuTOS system boots fine.

[joysfera]

oh really? Did @th-otto make a bug while refactoring the code for patching TOS 4.04?

[th-otto]

Unlikely, but not impossible. But that would only have an impact if you are loading TOS 4.04?

[uweseimet]

Any chance to get this issue resolved? It appears to be reproducable not just by me.