[rescue] HP 715, Nextstep, & CD-ROM drives.

[Jochen Kunz]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2004 10:51:33 -0500
"Sheldon T. Hall" <shel at cmhcsys.com> wrote:

> I have no idea, but I can tell you that when I bought a load of SCSI
> disks that had been formatted with a non-standard sector size, no tool
> I could find for either IRIX or Solaris would reformat 'em and fix the
> sector size. Even `sformat` wouldn't.
>
> I finally fixed them by slapping 'em in a PC with an Adaptec SCSI
> controller with built-in disk utilities.  It reformatted, re-sectored,
> inspected, etc. No problem.
>From NetBSD-current / 2.0 scsictl(8):

format [blocksize [immediate]]

(Low level) format the named device.  If the optional blocksize
parameter
is provided, the device geometry will be modified to use the specified
blocksize.  If this parameter is different form the Current or Default
Mode Page 3 parameters, the device will update Mode Page 3 at the suc-
cessful completion of the Format.  Device geometry may change as a
result
of using a new device blocksize.  When the optional blocksize parameter
is specified, the Defect List on the drive will revert to the original
primary defect list created at the time of manufacture if available.
The
drive will usually recertify itself during the Format and add any other
defective blocks to the new Defect List.  Some disks may not support the
ability to change the blocksize and may enter a Degraded Mode when fed a
Format command of this type.  If this happens the standard recovery for
the drive requires issuing a correct Format command, i.e. one without
the
blocksize parameter.

When the immediate parameter is also specified, the disk is instructed
to
return from the format command right away.  It continues to format, and
every ten seconds scsictl issues a TEST UNIT READY command to check the
associated sense data.  This associated sense data has a progress
indica-
tor which indicates how far the format is progressing.  Note well that
most SCSI disk drives prior to a few years ago do not support this op-
tion.
--


tsch|_,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/