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  From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
  To  : Daniel Callan <dcallan@wias.net.au>
  Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 08:46:55 +0930

Re: 520 Byte Sectors on IBM DCHS drives

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On Sunday,  1 April 2001 at 19:24:18 +1000, Daniel Callan wrote:
> 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!!

I've had this problem before.  On FreeBSD, there are some incantations
to do this.  To quote an earlier message,

> Yup, there's some other way to change it.  Set the current values,
> then immediately issue a format command:
> 
>   # camcontrol cmd da1 -v -c "15 10 0 0 v:i1 0" 12 -o 12 "0 0 0 8  0 0:i3 0 v:i3" 512
>   # camcontrol cmd -n da -u 1 -v -t 7200 -c "4 0 0 0 0 0"
>   # camcontrol modepage da1 -m 3
>   Tracks per Zone:  19
>   Alternate Sectors per Zone:  12
>   Alternate Tracks per Zone:  0
>   Alternate Tracks per Logical Unit:  38
>   Sectors per Track:  84
>   Data Bytes per Physical Sector:  512
>   Interleave:  1
>   Track Skew Factor:  13
>   Cylinder Skew Factor:  22
>   SSEC:  0
>   HSEC:  1
>   RMB:  0
>   SURF:  0

'camcontrol cmd' issues direct SCSI commands to the drive (here
/dev/da1, the second SCSI drive).  I don't know whether or what
program under Linux would do the same thing.  I can give you the
camcontrol man pages to aid with the translation if you like.

Greg
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