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> From: Larry Barras [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Wed 1/8/2003 5:08 PM > > I have no way to know about any other OS's, but you > should have absolutely no problem accessing the > last physical block of an ATA HDD on either the > classic Mac OS or OS X on any Mac that shipped in > the last 4-5 years. Intriguingly enough, depending on technique, raw Mac Lba access turns out to be a wildly controversial topic. I hear what works great on the Mac (and on Linux) are commands of the form `sudo dd if=/dev/disk0 ...`. I figure somebody should volunteer to abstract that idea and port it back to DOS & Windows. But the SCSI pass thru of DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, VxWorks, & friends has suddenly gone missing with Mac OS X, as I document in some detail at: http://members.aol.com/plscsi/mac.html http://search.lists.apple.com/ata-scsi-dev?q=STUC is a history of flame wars near here. I say I find the controversy "intriguing" because I have failed to find a straight answer. Apple even has a non-answer posted on the web for this: http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1179.html http://lists.apple.com/mhonarc/ata-scsi-dev/ at this moment shows you an ongoing work of trying to elaborate QA1179 til it makes sense, this time without having a flame ware stop the conversation mid-flow, in the thread titled "Re: SCSI pass thru lack still unexplained". But at this moment, with Mac OS X, you can't say op x25 Read Capacity (i.e. the ATAPI analogoue of getting maxLba+1 from op xEC ATA Identify data), see the maxLba reported there, and write the maxLba, unless you're willing to patch the kernel yourself. Whooops. Maybe "everybody knows" Mac OS X is BSD except that in more or less closed source Apple "improved" the GUI and the I/O. > of an ATA HDD I expect you mean an ATA HDD shipped inside the more or less sealed box that Apple ships. But all the same in passing I will mention, what hardware connects the ATA HDD matters. Certain bridges to the ATA of Compact Flash are thought to increment by one the reported last Lba e.g. http://lxr.linux.no/ident?v=2.5.49;i=US_FL_FIX_CAPACITY Pat LaVarre
