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

[Chris Albertson]

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