[3535] in linux-scsi channel archive
Re: SMP 2.1.90-pre3 SCSI kernel panic
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kurt Garloff)
Mon Mar 16 08:01:48 1998
Date: Mon, 16 Mar 1998 13:55:28 +0100
From: Kurt Garloff <garloff@kg1.ping.de>
To: linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu
Mail-Followup-To: linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.A32.3.95.980316123704.73576D-100000@werner.exp-math.uni-essen.de>; from Michael Weller on Mon, Mar 16, 1998 at 12:41:17PM +0100
On Mon, Mar 16, 1998 at 12:41:17PM +0100, Michael Weller wrote:
> Let me add that an (IMHO even more) alarmingly large number of SCSI drives
> these days ships with AWRE and ARRE bits enabled BUT NO SPARE sectors
> configured to be used to backup failing disk parts, hence redering this
> feature useless (but increasing the disk capacity by those sectors which
> is probably the reason why it is done). Again, scsiinfo can fix it, and I
> added a few lines to the docs of scsiinfo-1.7 telling you what to do.
>
> This 'format modification' is actually what requries the low-level format.
> AWRE and ARRE can be changed w/o a low-level format.
Let me ask some questions on this.
First of all: Where can I get scsiinfo-1.7? Is it on sunsite?
(I didn't see any information on spare sectors w/ 1.6 but the AWRE/ARRE
bits themselves.)
Second: Will it report the number of spare sectors my disks have? (I hope
good old IBM didn't make such nonsense.)
Third: At the end of most disks, some sectors are unused, since the
partition map is created in a DOS compatible manner allowing no more than
1023 cylinders. It would be very nice, if we could tell those stupid SCSI
disks without spare sectors to use these WITHOUT reformatting. I think,
normally spare blocks are spread over the disk to minimize performance hit,
but it would certainly help people to use ARRE/AWRE w/o reforamtting.
--
Kurt Garloff, Dortmund
<K.Garloff@ping.de>
PGP key on http://student.physik.uni-dortmund.de/homepages/garloff
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