SUMMARY: (FAILED to) format a Seagate 9GB disk

From: Witold Paluszynski <witold_at_ict.pwr.wroc.pl>
Date: Tue Aug 06 2002 - 11:09:42 EDT
Just for the sake of it, in case anyone wondered, after putting in
many hours of reading documentation and playing with the disk, I gave
up on a Seagate 9GB Cheetah, stubbornly presening itself as a 9GB
Barracuda, and would not let get itself formatted to anything but
1GB capacity.

More precisely, I was able to reformat and analyze, but not label
the disk with any tools available under Solaris.  I suspect a burnt
transistor or a trace caused hardware parameters of the disk
to appear different from what they should have been.

In my efforts to learn something and make use of the disk I received
significant help from Casper Dik and Peter Stokes.  Other people also
offered advice: Robert Reynolds, Mark McManus, and Juergen Waiblinger.

Thank you,
Witold Paluszynski <witold@ict.pwr.wroc.pl>
Institute of Tech. Cybernetics
Wroclaw University of Technology
Wroclaw, Poland


 > From witold Thu Jul 25 19:27:43 2002
 > To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
 > Subject: format a Seagate 9GB disk
 > 
 > Hi,
 > 
 > I have acquired a non-Sun, second-hand Seagate disk labeled as ST39204LC
 > (9GB Cheetah 18XL).  Both top labels and the appearance of the body, and
 > the circuit board, confirm, after a very careful examination of Seagate
 > documentation, that this is indeed the disk's identity.
 > 
 > However, after hot-plugging into an Ultra 450, the disk presents itself
 > as a 9GB Barracuda 9LP, and actually as:
 > <SEAGATE-ST39173N-3131 cyl 14382 alt 2 hd 3 sec 47>
 > Now, this is surely wrong, this is an SCA and not a 50-pin SCSI disk.
 > I am assuming someone has written wrong parameters to the disk.
 > 
 > Now my question(s): how can I bring the disk back to its true identity?
 > Format let's me set new parameters, but the variable number of sectors
 > per track confuses me.  Can someone provide the correct format parameters
 > for an ST39204LC?  I don't care about any data on the disk.
 > 
 > Thank you,
 > Witold Paluszynski <witold@ict.pwr.wroc.pl>
 > Institute of Tech. Cybernetics
 > Wroclaw University of Technology
 > Wroclaw, Poland
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Received on Tue Aug 6 11:13:54 2002

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