scott@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Scott Hazen Mueller) (10/12/90)
I've got a bit of a problem with a SCSI disk drive. I acquired through a trade a 'Northern Telecom MSD Mercury Series 8512-210SCSI/8040 8-Inch Winchester Disk Drive'. It seems to be reasonably normal SCSI - I got a power supply for it, hooked things up, and it talks to my system. I ran my tape-based format utility and it formatted away quite happily. The problem arose when I booted Unix (I'm working with a 4.3BSD Unix box) - I got the message "vmunix: gd0 at GD0 slave 0 gd0: bad blocksize 180". So I took a look at the manual for the drive, and sure enough, I have a choice of two blocksizes, 100 bytes and 180 bytes per sector. Looking through the Unix manual pages, it became evident that Unix really *really* wants 512-byte sectors, though it *might* be marginally possible to get it to cope with a different power of two. Anyway, my hope is that this can be worked around - I don't know all that much about SCSI interfacing, and I don't have kernel source to try to figure out the device driver. Is there any way to get this drive to use a different sector size? Failing that, is there a simple hack that would trick Unix into being happy with 180-byte sectors? Failing either of those, is there anyone who wants to buy a 673M SCSI drive with 180-byte sectors? :-( -- Scott Hazen Mueller | scott@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG or (ames|pyramid|vsi1)!zorch!scott 10122 Amador Oak Ct.| +1 408 253 6767 |Mail fusion-request@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG Cupertino, CA 95014|Love make, not more|for emailed sci.physics.fusion digests SF-Bay Public-Access Unix 408-996-7358/61/78/86 login newuser password public