[Sunhelp] How to Low-Level format a SCSI Drive

[Richard E Ravich]

Chris,

Sometimes, if you start a format running and interrupt the formatting
process before it conpletes, the drive will revert back to what the
default value.  I must warn you, that you might make the drive into an
anchor by doing it, but it may be worth a try.  

There is another way to reset the sector size by invoking format with the
expert switch set.  Then you can actually configure a mode select command
and send it to the drive.  It isn't impossible to do, but you'll need to
spend sometime reading the SCSI spec to determine the correct parameters
for the drive.

Good luck -- any questions, please feel free to ask.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Richard E. Ravich			Amdahl Corporation
Sunnyvale, California			(408) 746-3245
Amateur Radio Station WD6FIE		Email address: richardr at amdahl.com 
The views expressed are solely my own


On Sat, 5 Jun 1999, Chris Albertson wrote:

> I used to think one never needed to low level format SCSI drives.
> Well, I have a couple new "OEM" IBM 7200 RPM drives with 520 Byte
> sectors.  I have them now on a SPARC 4 with Solaris 7.  The Solaris
> format command is having all kinds of problems.  Just a flood of
> error mesages as soon as the verification phase started.  I tried
> the drives on a Linux system.  It was able to report that the 520
> byte block size is unsupported but there, any kind of read caused
> a kernel panic as the read caused a buffer overrun.
> 
> The drive is the DCHS-34550-04F (50 pin SCSI 7200RPM 4.55 GB) that
> can be seen at
> http://www.storage.ibm.com/storage/techsup/hddtech/dchs/dchsmod.htm
> 
> -- 
>    --Chris Albertson             home: chrisja at jps.net        
>      Redondo Beach, California   work: chris at topdog.logicon.com
> 
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