On Tue, 12 Oct 1999, Bob Nestor wrote:

> Frederick Bruckman  (fb@enteract.com) wrote:
> >The way I read Tommy Smith's message, the _default_ Sector Size was
> >256. I seem to recall Mkfs_1.45 coming up with odd defaults for the
> >other paramaters, but never anything but 512 for the Sector Size. So
> >is that the case, that Mkfs produced a _default_ Sector Size of 256,
> >or is this simply a case of pilot error?
> 
> I didn't change anything in that section of Mkfs for the 1.46 update, so 
> unless the new CodeWarrior Pro 5 compiler generated bad code this time 
> around this shouldn't be any different between 1.45 and 1.46.

Maybe this is an old problem. The poster who started this thread
solved his problem by reverting to Mkfs_1.45, but that was something
different.

> It's been some time since I looked at that section, but as I recall 
> it gets this value from the drive itself by doing a Mode Sense. 
> That's why some have reported in the past that they were unable to
> use certain disks with NetBSD because they were originally
> formatted for block sizes other than 512.

I seem to recall there's some kind of trickery involved in getting the
geometry with a Mode Sense. You get different values depending on how
you've set the "Notch" first: notch 0 for the whole drive synthetic
geometry, notches 1 - ? for actual values. FWB Hard Disk Toolkit
returns the notch 0 value by default; maybe Mkfs does it different,
i.e. _wrong_?

> MacOS seems to be able to deal with this though.