Re: Ahah, 4096 blocksize disk is not recognised under Linux?

[Geert U. <ge...@li...>]

On 7 Jan 2003, Kulwant Bhogal wrote:
> I noticed during the initialisation of the IDE partition that the disk light
> was on and that the power light level varied (as it does when the audio
> filter is being turned on and off or the machine has crashed). Is this normal?
> It can be a little unnerving at first.

That's the heartbeat feature :-) The more busy your machine is, the faster it
blinks.

> >> Partition check: 
> >> 
> >> sda: RDSK sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 sda7
> >> 
> >> sdb: sd.cBad block number/count requestedscsidisk I/O error: dev 08:10,
> >> sector 0
> >> unable to read partition table.
> 
> > Either the SCSI disk driver or the RDSK partition code cannot handle
> > 4096-byte sectors.
> 
> I hope it can be fixed, because otherwise, I will have the hassle of trying
> to get them converted somehow. 

If it's the RDSK partition code, we can probably fix it by looking at your RDB.
You can extract the RDB by dumping the first 2 cylinders to a file:

  dd if=/dev/sdb of=rdb.dump bs=4k count=xxx

Set `xxx' such that `xxx*4096' equals the number of bytes in the first 2
cylinders of the disk (use HdToolBox to find out the cylinder size).
Then sent us the output of `hexdump rdb.dump'.

> > So the driver doesn't seem to handle 4K sectors. Anyone on lkml who has a
> > definitive answer about that?
> 
> Haven't seen a response yet. 

Yes, unfortunate.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- ge...@li...

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds