sisul@ppgbms (Jim Sisul) (08/28/90)
We are having problems formatting a hard drive, and were wondering if anyone else might have seen the same behavior. Here is our hardware setup: Standalone Sparcstation 1+ (SunOS 4.1) running off of factory installed, initialized Quantum ProDrive (internal) as sd0. Fujitsu M2613SA (sd2) in a external SCSI adapter/box We cannot get the Fujitsu to format properly. We are trying the following configuration, running "format" as root (having booted from the primary sd0, running in multiuser mode): 1296 Cylinders 2 Alternates 1298 Physical Cylinders 6 Heads 34 Sectors/Track 3490 RPM (These parameters were the recommendation of our 3rd party supplier) After extracting and committing the original defect list, and labeling the drive, executing the format command results in the following errors: Block 264588 (1297/0/0), Fatal non-media error (illegal request) Warning: error writing backup label sd2: Error for command 'write' Error Level: Fatal Block: 264592 Sense Key: Illegal Request This error message is repeated for every head and track on cylinder 1297. Occasionally these errors occur during labeling, but labeling usually succeeds and we can go on to formatting, which always fails. The failures always occur on the first cylinder past the last one we set in our configuration, whether it's 1296 cylinders or even as low as 1280. The Fujitsu manual specs the drive as having 6 heads, 34 blocks/track (512 bytes/block), 3490 RPM, 1334 cylnders, 6 tracks/cylnder, 29,571 BPI recording density, 1681 TPI track density. Is there some formula for determining ncyl/pcyl based on what the disk manufacturer specifies as the number of actual cylnders? How many cylnders are allocated at the end of the disk for defect info, superblock backup, etc.? How many alt cylinders are needed? We appreciate your help. ___________________________________________________________________ |Regards, PPG Biomedical Systems | |Jim Sisul One Campus Drive | |914-741-4685 Pleasantville, NY. 10570 | |{..}!uunet!philabs!ppgbms!sisul ppgbms!sisul@philabs.philips.com | |___________________________________________________________________|