Messages in this thread |  | | From | a.vignani@crf ... | Date | Tue, 14 May 1996 07:12:19 +0100 | Subject | 520 byte sectors - any ideas? |
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Hi.
A friend of mine got an IBM662 SCSI hard disk coming from an IBM AS/400 system and we tried to install and read it on a Linux system, to no avail.
Seems that these disks are low-level formatted with a 520-byte sector size, which is correctly recognized by Linux on startup. Unfortunately this is an unsupported size; Linux allows only 256,512 and 1024-byte sectors. There are so many >>9 and <<9 in the code I really doubt it could be easily modified.
Besides, after issuing the messages about unsupported size and removed device, the Linux kernel panics! The NULLed device is nevertheless passed to allocate_device() in scsi.c and the system behaves accordingly. (this should be considered a bug, I think).
We succeeded at least in booting the kernel by removing the SCSI disk support and using only the generic (/dev/sg*) devices, but then we have no way of reading data out of the disk; I suppose we should write a special-purpose driver.
Anybody out there had prior encounters with such disks? Any ideas?
Alberto
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