Re: Parted CHS news... (non-512-byte sectors)

[William Studenmund]

On Aug 1, 2004, at 6:48 PM, John Gilmore wrote:

> > Firstly, does anyone know anything about sector sizes != 512?  I've
> > never seen one in the wild.
>
> Many SCSI disks can be formatted to have 1024-byte sectors, or larger.
> CDROM drives (except those with Sun-modified firmware) have
> non-512-byte sectors; I think they're 2048 but don't quote me.

Usually they are 2048-byte sectors.

> Whether any of these would work in an IBM PC, or with a PC BIOS, or
> with Windows, or with Linux, is a whole 'nother question.
>
> Older SCSI hardware (the kind that you ran the whole-disk FORMAT
> command on; the ones that didn't come already formatted) is certainly
> capable of it.  Hmm, Andrew, I may have some of these drives around,
> that I could ship to you, if the modern SCSI drives you have access to
> can't do a non-512 FORMAT command.
>
> I've been looking for open source software for running format commands
> and such on SCSI disks; anybody have any pointers?  Sun had an offline
> (boot it) formatter in the old days; they replaced it with one that
> ran under Unix (in a miniroot during installation).  Both proprietary.
> /dev/scsi had some driver software, but it was also proprietary.  This
> is one of the few things the open source world has not replicated,
> even though we have the sg (SCSI Generic) driver support to use it.


Check out 
http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/sbin/scsictl/scsictl.c for one 
example. This tool is a SCSI control tool for NetBSD. It has a format 
option, which I added way back when I was playing with 1k sector disks.

Take care,

BIll

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