LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Daniel Callan <dcallan@wias.net.au>
  To  : <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Sun, 01 Apr 2001 19:24:18 +1000

520 Byte Sectors on IBM DCHS drives

Hi all,

Has anyone out there had to overcome this little problem before:
We have just aquired a bundle of IBM DCHS-34550-04F (4.5GB 50-pin SEF SCSI 
) drives
in an old HP disk array, and I am trying to make use of them individually 
for a bunch of
SPARC Classic's (Running RH6.2) that we use as low-end webservers for small 
clients.

They are detected as drives perfectly (in Linux bootup and even if I 
"Stop+A" to the ROM and do a "probe-scsi-all")
The problem is that they refuse to talk to the system on the grounds that 
have 520 Byte sectors
(during bootup it reports this just before refusing to reference it to 
/dev/sdX )

I have been scouring various pages/archives online (IBM being the least 
helpful so far), but so far
all I can find is a handful of other people with the exact same 
drive/problem EXCEPT that they are
all running Solaris and the only suggestions they got were to low-level 
format them with "sformat"
(Which is AFAIK just for Solaris....well there is lots of stuff at the 
homepage about how you might
port it yourself but it is not within my range of talents I'm afraid).

The irony of having these SUN boxes running RH but needing a Solaris 
program is not much comfort :-\
And even if I did, and ran sformat, is this the solution or just the only 
known kludge for it???

Anyway, any help/advice/experience with this would be greatly appreciated!!

Cheers,
-Daniel

Daniel Callan
dcallan@wias.net.au

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