Re: Very large SCSI drives and partitioning.
Peter S Galbraith writes ("Re: Very large SCSI drives and partitioning. "):
>
>Richard Kaszeta wrote:
>
>> I've gotten a
>> ST173404LW drive (73.4 Gig Ultra2 160 drive),
>> However, I can't partition the new drive. Cfdisk on debian 2.1
>> refuses to talk to it at all. fdisk will talk to it, but thinks it
>> only has 4.5 GB of capacity.
>
>Did you try passing the disk geometry to the kernel at boot time?
>e.g. using lilo:
>
> LILO: somekernelname sdb=14100,24,424
>
>Just guessing here...
Well, the kernel seems to be able to figure out most of it by itself:
SCSI device sdb: hdwr sector= 512 bytes. Sectors= 143374738 [70007 MB] [70.0 GB]
which is indeed the correct sector count and capacity according to Seagate's spec sheet.
Here's excerpts from 'scsiinfo -a /dev/sdb' for it:
Serial Number '3CE02MCM00007044LENE'
Data from Rigid Disk Drive Geometry Page
----------------------------------------
Number of cylinders 14100
Number of heads 24
Starting write precomp 0
Starting reduced current 0
Drive step rate 0
Landing Zone Cylinder 0
RPL 0
Rotational Offset 0
Rotational Rate 10016
Data from Format Device Page
----------------------------
Removable Medium 0
Supports Hard Sectoring 1
Supports Soft Sectoring 0
Addresses assigned by surface 0
Tracks per Zone 1810
Alternate sectors per zone 0
Alternate tracks per zone 6
Alternate tracks per lun 0
Sectors per track 424
Bytes per sector 512
Interleave 1
Track skew factor 95
Cylinder skew factor 85
So apparently scsiinfo and Seagate appear to agree that
cylinder=14100, and heads=24.
Sectors appear to be 424, which means that total raw capacity is
24*14100*424=143481600, which is slightly larger than the 143374738
reported by the kernel and seagate.
However, fdisk doesn't allow me to partition it:
zombie:~# fdisk /dev/sdb
Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun or SGI disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
content won't be recoverable.
The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 4471.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Command (m for help):
So it's defaulting to a cylinder count of 4471, not the 14100 it should be.
So let's try expert mode:
Command (m for help): x
Disk /dev/sdb: 64 heads, 32 sectors, 4471 cylinders
Nr AF Hd Sec Cyl Hd Sec Cyl Start Size ID
1 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 00
2 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 00
3 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 00
4 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 00
Expert command (m for help): h
Number of heads (1-256, default 64): 24
Expert command (m for help): c
Number of cylinders (1-65535, default 4471): 14100
The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 14100.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
So far, so good...
Expert command (m for help): s
Number of sectors (1-63, default 32): 464
Value out of range.
Number of sectors (1-63, default 32):
So it's not letting me up the sector count. So the max capacity I've
seen so far in fdisk is 63*14100*24=21319200, or about 1/7th of the
real capacity.
'mke2fs /dev/sdb' appears to work fine, however. I still don't know
if this won't hurt anything... Just skiddish before trusing 60 GB of
data to it (although it is backed up via networker)
--
Richard W Kaszeta PhD. Candidate and Sysadmin
bofh@me.umn.edu University of MN, ME Dept
http://www.menet.umn.edu/~kaszeta
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