On Thursday, October 10, 2002, at 08:42 PM, Russell McManus wrote:

> The disk is from IBM.  I have never seen a sector size other than
> 512: is there something weird about this disk?  Any ideas about how
> to proceed?

These disks are OEM disks configured for Tandem/Compaq/HP systems or 
for use on IBM AS/400 systems.  Both used custom sector sizes.  There 
are a lot of these disks now showing on on eBay.

The good news is they can be reconfigured for 512 byte sector sizes and 
then they can be used in typical applications.  I've used them on Mac, 
PC and Sun.  The "scsictl" command was updated to handle this in the 
format command.  See the man page for details.

You can find some of the technical manuals for these drives (DCHS-04F 
and DGHS-04Z) on the IBM web site under the name UltraStar.

Hope this helps,
-bob