David Jones wrote:
>
>> 	Here's a question... how do I deal with a disk w/o geometry?
>> I have a SCSI disk made by IBM that won't respond to the driver's
>> geometry request.  I would suppose that I have to figure it out... and
>> then somehow communicate this in the disk label?  Some hints would be
>> nice.  I don't think that it will be too great a problem to find info
>> on the true (or close to true) nature of the disk.
>
>The actual geometry of a SCSI disk is irrelevant.  You need only come up with
>something having same or fewer blocks.
>
>One way might be to write an absurdly big label (e.g. 4GB disk), then dd to
>the disk and write down the block offset when the writes fail due to being
>beyond end of medium.  Then figure the label from that.
>
>BTW, if this IBM disk is so nonstandard as to not respond to the geometry
>command, don't expect it to work right on NetBSD.
>

Actually, they will, as long as you write a somewhat reasonable disk label.
I've got a smaller IBM drive that does the same thing (mode sense fails 
trying to read the geometry; ya gotta love a manufacturer that deliberately 
doesn't conform to standard SCSI conventions) on an i386 box that works 
just fine.  Every time I boot I get the error:

sd1(ahb0:1:0): illegal request, data = 00 00 00 00 24 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 32 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
sd1: could not mode sense (4); using fictitious geometry

but it will find and use the geometry written on the disklabel:

sd1 at scsibus0: 382MB, 382 cyl, 64 head, 32 sec, 512 bytes/sec

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Matt Ragan  (matt@ibmoto.com)  Motorola/IBM Somerset PowerPC Design Center
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