On Tue, May 30, 2000 at 08:13:27PM +0000, Thomas Lockhart wrote:
-> > Tom, have you considered reformatting the drive to use 512 byte sectors
-> > like the rest of the world?
->
-> afaik that is not an option. The drive has 2048byte physical sectors;
-> until Fujitsu built that drive the largest sector size was 1024bytes
-> which is why the 2.0.x kernels required patching to use the drive.
->
-> The drive uses 512byte sectors when mounting the backward-compatible
-> 230MB disks.
->
-> Unfortunately, most of the references to the drive in the context of
-> Linux are in Japanese (from an Altavista search) so I haven't been able
-> to find an answer yet...
Sorry, it's the physical sectors I had in mind. On your SCSI host adapter
(HA) BIOS, you may find an option to reformat. Cool so far, but you will
get 2048 sectors. First, you need to send a command to the drive to tell
it to use 512 byte sectors. Then you tell the drive to format itself. Then
you go home for the night.
It's really low level stuff, and I have never done it with a PC HA. I've
always used custom disk drive test equiptment (when I worked at Maxtor) or
the Atari ST to do it.
First thing to do is get a spec for the appropriate verion of SCSI your
drive claims to support. See if commands to set the sector size and format
are required. Format I believe has been required since SCSI I. I forget
now whether the command to set the sector size is a required command or a
Maxtor extension.
If you do, you may gain disk drive space, or, more likely, you will lose
space (more inter-record gaps for the amount of data).
Somebody at JPL must know more about SCSI drives than I do. :-)
--
-- C^2
No windows were crashed in the making of this email.
Looking for fine software and/or web pages?
http://w3.trib.com/~ccurley
