cha05e90 wrote:Belxjander wrote:the drive in question is the second drive, I will have a 160GB "boot" drive and would like to convert this drive ....
there is no requirement or need of the SLB to be installed onto this drive at all...
So, what is it? A "boot" drive? Then you have to install the SLB. If it's not a boot drive, but a second HD without the need to boot from, then you might be lucky. BTW: There's no RDB on OS4.x-prepped HDs anymore. The SLB (sic) loads the filesystem kickstart module from a (f.ex.) SFS formatted HD (SFS is readable by UBoot itself).
I'll have 2 drives in the machine,
1x 160GB "boot" drive << this is coming with the motherboard,
1x 500GB "data" drive << this is the drive currently in-use with PC-MBR partition schema that I want to convert.
I'll be preparing the "boot" drive on its own initially then adding the 500GB drive as a data drive after moving everything I want from the windows installation over to the Amiga so that I can consider the NTFS partition entirely "deletable"...
the only change to the drive I am wanting to do is change the PC-MBR schema on the 500GB drive to an RDB schema, and to do without any kind of "formatting"/"installation" or other higher level assumptions.
just read the PC-MBR and re-write the first 64 blocks of content with a valid RDB schema, the catch being to retain the defined reiserfs partition locations without major incident or data loss.
I've got ~96MB of space on the drive at the beginning that is currently unused (I used gparted to validly relocate the reiserfs partition and free that up "just in case" so that there is no clobbering the header data within the filesystem itself.
Are there any standard libraries with RDB schema read/write functionality usable such as the HdWrench.library used for the 3.5/3.9 HDToolbox ? because I am more than willing to write a "ConvertPartitionSchema" tool myself for this.
I'd just like to do so where the results would not be catastrophic data loss (at this point even just killing the PC-MBR and writing an empty RDB to start with would be okay too... since I can "recover" any of the reiserfs partition content with the tools I already have)