[lug] sector size

[Michael J. Pedersen]

On Fri, Aug 25, 2000 at 12:34:16AM -0600, D. Stimits wrote:
> I'm trying to find out what the sector size is on a scsi drive, for use
> with dd. For scsi, I can't find this in bios, not even in the scsi drive
> utilities for adaptec. fdisk doesn't seem to report this either. What
> would be the easiest non-destructive way to find out the sector size on
> a given scsi drive?

Actually, unless you're doing scandisk style operations, the sector size is
pretty useless anymore, even for dd.

You see, what happens with dd is you tell it how big you want the blocks to
be, and it copies blocks of that size. For instance, say you wanted to copy
the entire partition, block for block, and the partition is named /dev/sda1,
to a partition named /dev/sda2 (which happens to be of the same size in terms
of 1k blocks, which is in fdisk). You could do the following command:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sda2 bs=1k

However, the bs (blocksize) does not need to be specified. In which case, it
will default to 512 bytes, and copy the entire partition in 512 byte blocks.

For most any operation with dd, the sector size is unimportant. Please feel
free to email again if you need more information.

-----
Michael J. Pedersen
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