Re: [expert] Fujitsu MO640 SCSI drive troubles
> 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. :-) Maybe. But don't count on it ;) afaik this is not a viable option for this drive; it is MO and may have some physical registering on the platter for the sectors. And if it were possible, it wouldn't have been necessary to patch the 2.0.x kernel to use the drive. Thanks for the suggestions. I do have a contact in Japan, and will ask him to skim the Japanese web sites for info. Will report back... - Tom -- Thomas Lockhart Caltech/JPL Interferometry Systems and Technology
Re: [expert] Fujitsu MO640 SCSI drive troubles
On Tue, May 30, 2000 at 08:13:27PM +, 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
Re: [expert] Fujitsu MO640 SCSI drive troubles
> 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... - Tom -- Thomas Lockhart Caltech/JPL Interferometry Systems and Technology
Re: [expert] Fujitsu MO640 SCSI drive troubles
On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 03:05:28AM +, Thomas Lockhart wrote: -> I've finally upgraded my home machine to Mdk-7.0-2 from RH-5.2 (I've -> been running my laptop and a couple of other machines on it for a few -> months). -> -> I am having trouble accessing my Fujitsu MO640 disk drive. My old -> RH-5.2/Linux-2.0.3x kernels required patching to use it, but the 2.2.x -> kernels have support for 2048 byte sectors built in. The kernel reports -> reasonable info when I boot with a disk in the drive. cfdisk reports the -> correct sector count and disk size, but says something about a "partial -> partition" when writing a new partition table. mkfs fails miserably, -> throwing SCSI errors when it tries to read sectors *way* off the end of -> the disk. Needless to say, mount fails even on existing disks. I saw a -> thread from some time ago (kernel circa 2.2.9) indicating that getting -> consistant info for the disk size and sector size might be problematic, -> but it did not report a solution. -> -> Has anyone had recent success with this drive? Any hints or suggestions -> on parameters to specify or change which might get this working? After -> doing a clean install, all of my backup files are on this drive... :/ Tom, have you considered reformatting the drive to use 512 byte sectors like the rest of the world? -- -- 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
[expert] Fujitsu MO640 SCSI drive troubles
I've finally upgraded my home machine to Mdk-7.0-2 from RH-5.2 (I've been running my laptop and a couple of other machines on it for a few months). I am having trouble accessing my Fujitsu MO640 disk drive. My old RH-5.2/Linux-2.0.3x kernels required patching to use it, but the 2.2.x kernels have support for 2048 byte sectors built in. The kernel reports reasonable info when I boot with a disk in the drive. cfdisk reports the correct sector count and disk size, but says something about a "partial partition" when writing a new partition table. mkfs fails miserably, throwing SCSI errors when it tries to read sectors *way* off the end of the disk. Needless to say, mount fails even on existing disks. I saw a thread from some time ago (kernel circa 2.2.9) indicating that getting consistant info for the disk size and sector size might be problematic, but it did not report a solution. Has anyone had recent success with this drive? Any hints or suggestions on parameters to specify or change which might get this working? After doing a clean install, all of my backup files are on this drive... :/ TIA - Tom -- Thomas Lockhart Caltech/JPL Interferometry Systems and Technology
