I have an old ST296N drive that I wanted to use as an emergency
boot disk, in case I had a bad crash on my real drive.  It will
give me an extra 5MB or so if I format it with 1024 byte sectors
instead of 512 byte sectors.  However, when I did that, I had no
problems writing the disklabel, getting a boot image on it, etc.
but when I tried to newfs a root partition on it, I got an error
that I won't be able to decipher until I dig into the source.  I
am asking the group if this is a known problem, or if there are
easy work arounds, so as not to waste too much time with things
that might already be in the queue...  If nothing turns up, I'll
probably waste the extra 5MB and just reformat it.  What follows
is the the output from disklabel and newfs.  Thanks in advance,

Jon Buller

Script started on Tue Jun 11 23:10:49 1996
bullbox# disklabel /dev/rsd1c
# /dev/rsd1c:
type: SCSI
disk: st296n
label: 
flags:
bytes/sector: 1024
sectors/track: 43
tracks/cylinder: 19
sectors/cylinder: 817
cylinders: 107
total sectors: 87419
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0           # milliseconds
track-to-track seek: 0  # milliseconds
drivedata: 0 

4 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize   cpg]
  a:    64543     5719    4.2BSD     1024  8192     0   # (Cyl.    7 - 85)
  b:    17157    70262      swap                        # (Cyl.   86 - 106)
  c:    87419        0    unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 106)
  d:     5718        1      boot                        # (Cyl.    0*- 6*)
bullbox# newfs /dev/rsd1a
write error: 64542
wtfs: Invalid argument
bullbox# ^D

Script done on Tue Jun 11 23:11:33 1996