[4843] in linux-scsi channel archive
Re: 2K sectors
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ronald Wahl)
Thu Oct 8 18:24:40 1998
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1998 20:16:28 +0200 (CEST)
From: Ronald Wahl <rwahl@gmx.net>
To: William Brioschi <capo@writeme.com>
cc: Linux SCSI mailing list <linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu>
In-Reply-To: <m0zRBHG-00022yC@fire.casa.brioschi.net>
On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, William Brioschi wrote:
> I have a 640M magneto-optical drive which uses 2K blocks.
> Of course, Linux (2.0.29) complains about the unsupported sector size.
>
> I _have_ to use it, mainly for backup purposes. Performance is not an issue:
> I would be happy with a 100K/sec.
No big problem.
> I think there are three possibilities to be able to access a cartdridge:
> 1) make Linux scsi disk and low level drivers digest the big sectors; this is
> probably not a very good idea, unless it's already been done in a newer
> kernel... has it?
There are patches for 2.0.x. Actual 2.1.x support it already.
> 2) make the drive understand I need 1K sectors; the SCSI-HOWTO says something
> about the MODE SELECT command, how can I send it? will it work? will I have
> to reformat the cartdridges (which come preformatted at low level with a 2K
> sector)? how will I lo level format a cartdridge?
Not possible. MO media are hard sectorized. Look at the disk and you will
see the sectors - you can't change this by software tools.
> 3) use the device in raw, sequential mode (through tar or something like that),
> probably using the SCSI generic driver; I haven't tried this yet, is it
> possible? should I do something particular or can I simply do a
> "tar cf /dev/sga"?
ROTFL :))
Go to: http://home.pages.de/~mbuck/linux/patches.html
Get the patch for your kernel (patch for 2.0.30 should also do with 2.0.29
if I remember correctly).
You need a patched fdisk if you're going to partitionize the media (dont
know where to find the patch). I prefer to use it as superfloppy, i.e. not
using a partition table. If you create an ext2-FS on the disk you have to
specify the blocksize with -b 2048. Other filesystems than ext2 _may_ not
work correctly.
ron
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