This message generated a parse failure. Raw output follows here. Please use 'back' to navigate. From devnull@lkml.org Sat Sep 23 05:55:45 2023 Received: from nic.funet.fi (nic.funet.fi [128.214.248.6]) by herbie.ucs.indiana.edu (8.7.5/8.6.12) with ESMTP id OAA28674 for ; Thu, 31 Oct 1996 14:54:19 -0500 (EST) Received: from vger.rutgers.edu ([128.6.190.2]) by nic.funet.fi with ESMTP id <61980-25471>; Thu, 31 Oct 1996 21:54:57 +0200 Received: by vger.rutgers.edu id <21727-11854>; Thu, 31 Oct 1996 14:43:56 -0500 Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 14:40:08 -0500 From: System Administration Message-Id: <199610311940.OAA00791@chaos.analogic.com> To: jalvo@cloud9.net, root@chaos.analogic.com Subject: Re: SCSI Sector Size Problem Cc: linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu, rsheehy@ac4.jjc.cc.il.us Sender: owner-linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu Precedence: bulk Low-level formatting is always allowed on SCSI drives. It is part of the standard. I have the SCSI standard and I use the SCSI standard in my everyday work. Whether or not the low-level format actually does anything is quite another story. On some cheap drives, the bad-blobkock replacement table is simply zeroed. Note that SCSI drives are always supposed to look "perfect" to the outside world. Blocks are automatically replaced until the table is full. After this, sense data will show a write failure. More expensive drives will write new sector headers. Most new drivesSCSI drives have embeded serveo so you don't have a dedicated area for the servo information. This allows the distk to be written (where convenient) during a low-level format. Subsequent reads and writes will serve o to the center of the newly created tracks. This means that you can't do anything bad to the drive by low-level formatting it. Of course you eliminate any data that had been present. If you low-level format a SCSI Drive, it would be advantageous to do the following: (1) Mount the drive in its final position. (2) Pust all the pieces of you machine r machine back together. (3) Let the drive warm up for several hours. (4) THEN format the drive. (5) If the format utility has a bad-block scan, exercise this also. Bad blocks will be aotomaticallyutomatically relocated. If not, temporarily partition and format it with DOS. MS-DOS reads the entire disk drive during its high-level format. This will force bad blocks to be reloated. (6) Then do you r Linux FS building. Later, djohnson@analogic.com