[lug] SCSI disk info

[Harris, James]

Yes, the sector size is what's killing you.  If you have an Adaptec SCSI
controller lying around for a PC, you might try the low level format in the
BIOS of the controller.  I can't remember if this used to work or not, but
my belly seems to say yes.

STK used to do this to their disks in their arrays, so when I was at that
account, we used to mooch test disks off of the engineers and use them for
our own evil deeds.  We had to have them low level formatted back to 512
before they were useful (STK made them 514, if I remember correctly).
Usually the engineers would hook the disk up to their proprietary stuff that
would do the reformat, but I seem to remember that a few times they didn't
and I tried the low level option in the Adaptec BIOS with success.  It'll
take a few hours, but it's worth the try.

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Robertson [mailto:alanr at unix.sh] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2002 07:02
To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
Subject: Re: [lug] SCSI disk info


Ken Weinert wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> 	I'm installing SuSE 7.3 on a Sparcstation 2 and so far that is 
> working OK -
> what I'm trying to do is to add another HD that is somewhat larger than
the 
> old 450M drive in it now.
> 
> 	I'm running into a problem tho:
> 
> sdb : unsupported sector size 520.
> scsi : deleting disk entry.
> 
> 	So my question is this: what method can I use to "reformat" (?) the 
> disk to
> a supported number of sectors? I suspect this will have to be some method 
> other than booting into the SCSI controller :)


I don't think it's the size of the disk, but the fact that it seems to be 
formatted with 520 byte blocks instead of the usual 512 byte blocks.  This 
is a pain to fix.  You basically have to know what SCSI commands to issue to

the disk, and then issue them through a passthrough interface.  I think 
Linux supports passthrough commands in some form.

	-- Alan Robertson
	   alanr at unix.sh

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