Identical hard drives, different disklabel sectors/cylinders
Hi all, I've got a problem question about my hard drives. I've installed two brand-new Western Digital 250GB drives on the same channel of a Maxtor-branded PCI/IDE controller (Promise chipset). I've tried different channels, different cables, and using the motherboard's IDE controller -- same thing every time. Here's from /var/log/messages: Dec 18 15:59:23 /kernel: ad4: 238475MB [484521/16/63] at ata2-master UDMA100 Dec 18 15:59:23 /kernel: ad5: 238475MB [484521/16/63] at ata2-slave UDMA100 So you can see it's identifying them the same at startup. Now: su-2.05b# disklabel ad4 # /dev/ad4c: type: unknown disk: amnesiac label: flags: bytes/sector: 512 sectors/track: 63 tracks/cylinder: 255 sectors/cylinder: 16065 cylinders: 30400 sectors/unit: 488392002 rpm: 3600 interleave: 1 trackskew: 0 cylinderskew: 0 headswitch: 0 # milliseconds track-to-track seek: 0 # milliseconds drivedata: 0 8 partitions: #size offsetfstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] c: 4883920020unused0 0# (Cyl.0 - 30400*) e: 4883920020 vinum # (Cyl.0 - 30400*) su-2.05b# disklabel ad5 # /dev/ad5c: type: unknown disk: amnesiac label: flags: bytes/sector: 512 sectors/track: 63 tracks/cylinder: 16 sectors/cylinder: 1008 cylinders: 484520 sectors/unit: 488397105 rpm: 3600 interleave: 1 trackskew: 0 cylinderskew: 0 headswitch: 0 # milliseconds track-to-track seek: 0 # milliseconds drivedata: 0 8 partitions: #size offsetfstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] c: 4883971050unused0 0# (Cyl.0 - 484520*) e: 4883971050 vinum # (Cyl.0 - 484520*) So you can see, the "sectors/cylinder", "cylinders", and "sectors/unit" are all different, and this results in slightly different final sizes. I've set up vinum to create a mirror using the smaller of the two sizes, and it seems to be working fine, but I'm still worried about the implications of this. Could this mean that one of my hard drives is failing? (Again, they're both brand new.) I tried "disklabel -R"'ing each drive to look like the other one (booting in single-user mode), but it wouldn't let me. So I'm smack out of ideas. I'd appreciate any info or suggestions. Thanks, -Brock Witherspoon ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
Re: Identical hard drives, different disklabel sectors/cylinders
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Sunday 19 December 2004 00:31, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Hi all, > > I've got a problem question about my hard drives. I've installed > two brand-new Western Digital 250GB drives on the same channel of > a Maxtor-branded PCI/IDE controller (Promise chipset). I've tried > different channels, different cables, and using the motherboard's > IDE controller -- same thing every time. Here's from > /var/log/messages: > > Dec 18 15:59:23 /kernel: ad4: 238475MB > [484521/16/63] at ata2-master UDMA100 Dec 18 15:59:23 /kernel: ad5: > 238475MB [484521/16/63] at ata2-slave UDMA100 > > So you can see it's identifying them the same at startup. Now: > > su-2.05b# disklabel ad4 > # /dev/ad4c: > bytes/sector: 512 > sectors/track: 63 > tracks/cylinder: 255 > sectors/cylinder: 16065 > cylinders: 30400 > sectors/unit: 488392002 [...] > su-2.05b# disklabel ad5 > # /dev/ad5c: > bytes/sector: 512 > sectors/track: 63 > tracks/cylinder: 16 > sectors/cylinder: 1008 > cylinders: 484520 > sectors/unit: 488397105 [...] > So you can see, the "sectors/cylinder", "cylinders", and "sectors/unit" > are all different, and this results in slightly different final sizes. > I've set up vinum to create a mirror using the smaller of the two sizes, > and it seems to be working fine, but I'm still worried about the > implications of this. Could this mean that one of my hard drives is > failing? (Again, they're both brand new.) I tried "disklabel -R"'ing each > drive to look like the other one (booting in single-user mode), but it > wouldn't let me. So I'm smack out of ideas. I'd appreciate any info or > suggestions. Your disks slice tables holding different values for C/H/S geometry. You can wipe out the slice tables with the dd(1) command and re-initialize them with fdisk and bsdlabel or sysinstall. There is an example written on this in 'man 8 bsdlabel'. It seems that your BIOS identifies geometry of both disks listed in your dmesg output - C/H/S 484521/16/63. This values also shown in your bsdlabel output of ad5. If you want to re-fdisk and re-bsdlabel ad4 it's necessary that the disk isn't mounted and that it isn't locked by vinum (see also 'man 4 vinum', chapters RUNNING VINUM and AUTOMATIC STARTUP). IMHO there is only one thing that can go wrong with your configuration: If you are booting your system from the mirror, I would test if both of your drives are bootable. - -- Christian Hiris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | OpenPGP KeyID 0x3BCA53BE OpenPGP-Key at hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net and http://pgp.mit.edu -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.2.6 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQFBxNof09WjGjvKU74RAtgWAJ98M9KSoTPsHJU3Ba+JTHrNN2QdmwCfTmwy bFFRyDuNRfAwc3f1R/6PbeI= =j26F -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
Re: Identical hard drives, different disklabel sectors/cylinders
Thanks for the responses. Sorry for the delay in replying. orville weyrich said: > (1) make sure that the BIOS settings are the same for > both drives. I don't think this is an issue, as I haven't touched the BIOS for this IDE card, and it should be on full-auto mode. > (2) is there a jumper on the drive itself that affects > sector mapping? No. > (3) do you have all the /dev/ad4 and /dev/ad5 devices > (try MAKEDEV ad) I MAKEDEV'd both ad4 and ad5 at least once. > (4) have you tried the > /stand/sysinstall->configure->label method of editing > the labels? Does it report a discrepancy between BIOS > and memory disk geometry? Yes, I tried /stand/sysinstall several times, and actually I can't remember whether it gave me that error. However, I have gotten that error many times in the past and was under the impression that it was a fairly normal thing and should be ignored. > (5) have you tried using disklable -e to directly edit > the labels to copy the "good" label to the "bad" > drive? Yes, I tried editing both labels, and it wouldn't take for either. Christian Hiris said: > Your disks slice tables holding different values for C/H/S geometry. > You can wipe out the slice tables with the dd(1) command and > re-initialize them with fdisk and bsdlabel or sysinstall. There is an > example written on this in 'man 8 bsdlabel'. I dd'd both drives several times. I never used bsdlabel, as I was under the impression that disklabel is more recent. > IMHO there is only one thing that can go wrong with your configuration: > If you are booting your system from the mirror, I would test if both > of your drives are bootable. Well, these disks are just extra storage under /var, and ad0 and ad1 are the bootable disks in this system. So I guess I don't have anything to worry about. Again, thanks for your help :) ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
