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Re: wrong sector size



On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 04:56:47PM +0100, Thomas H?hn wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I have got a SparcStation 5 since a few weeks. It's my first Sparc.
> 
> The SparcStation has no floppy or CD drive. So I installed Debian 3.0
> via netboot.
> 
> Since the 500 MB hard disk is not much, I've bought a 9 gig drive from
> ebay (IBM DGHS-09Y).
> 
> I plugged it into the backplane and tried to start Debian.
> But it reported "sda: unsupported sector size 520" and then "scsi:
> deleting disk entry".
> 
> It stops booting with the message "kernel NULL pointer dereference".
> 
> I think I have to reformat the drive with a sector size of 512. Is that
> correct? I have found two utilities to do that: scsiformat and
> setblocksize (http://micha.freeshell.org/scsi/).
> 
> The problem is, that I have to unplug the drive in order to boot. After
> that i can plug it in again. But those tools need to be given the drive
> in terms of /dev/sdb or sonething similar.
> If i use "scsiadd -a 1", it's again "deleting disk entry".
> 
> Is there a way to use these tools? They seem to use the sg driver. How
> can I get this driver to "bind to" the drive, instead of the scsi disk
> driver?
> 
> The other solution (formatting on a scsi hostadapter) is not possible at
> the moment because I have no adapter (it's a SCA drive).
> 
> Can you help me?


I bet that disc was once used in an Iceburg array.

Linux really does not like non 512-block formatting and generally just
crashes...

You can try

1: plugging it in after booting and using something like
	scsiadd -a 0 4 0
   if it is scsi ID 4 on the first scsi bus.

2: format it in solaris (this definately works ;O)

--
Paul



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