Dear Sun-Managers,
My original question was seeking a format.dat entry for the REO650
optical drive and tips for re-formatting an optical disk.
After finally finding the Pinnacle Micro REO650 User's Guide, there's a
format script called "reo_format" included with the software that will
re-format an optical disk with instructions on labelling and creating a
new filesystem.
Many thanks to Kevin Sheehan (Kevin.Sheehan@uniq.com.au) and Mark
Anderson (anderson@neon.mitre.org).
Here's the replies and the original posting at the end.
Regards,
Simon
Simon Gibbons
Technology Services Officer
Australian Institute of Family Studies
Melbourne, Australia
Tel: 61-3-9214 7880
Fax: 61-3-9214 7839
simong@aifs.org.au
----- Begin Included Message -----
From: Kevin.Sheehan@uniq.com.au (Kevin Sheehan {Consulting Poster Child})
Subject: Re: Re-formatting an optical disk
Well, my experience is more withe the Sony F521 F531 drives, but similar.
The problem my client had was that they believed the number that was given
in some very sketchy documentation. The 1.3GB media is what we were using.
The Sony can either answer as an OPTICAL device (for which mode I did a
driver for 4.x and 5.x) or as a CCS-1 DIRECT (disklike) device, in which
case "sd" will talk to it. I presume that latter is the mode in which
the Pinnacle talks to you? Or do you have a driver for it?
The two problems my client had:
1) number of cylinders was > 32767, and the field used to hold that is
a signed short. I halved the number of cylinders and lied to
it about number of heads to fix that. When we make the FS, we
also use the -i and -t options to better lay out the FS.
2) the number of cylinders as reported in the example was wrong. On the
1.3GB media, the Sony docs say you have 37600 tracks (logically - they
are arranged somewhat differently in variable zones on the disk) but
what you don't find out till you look at the ISO spec for the media
is that some of the tracks are reserved for defect lists.
But wait - there's more! :-) My driver doesn't label the disk by default,
it treats it as one partition and uses READ CAPACITY to find out how
large the disk is. The answer I get there is 37527 tracks. So we end
up losing one when we divide by 2 to lie about heads. In the end, we
got this to work:
2 heads
31 sectors/track
18760 cylinders
3 alternates
This seemed to work, the client wrote off 1 of the alternate cylinders
when they formatted to ship to their customer.
In short, my guess is that you are either using 1.3GB media and it is
getting confused when you newfs it, or that you need to do a READ CAPACITY
command and finger out what the drive reports as true capacity and
build a format.dat around that.
l & h,
kev
----- End Included Message -----
----- Begin Included Message -----
From: anderson@neon.mitre.org (Mark S. Anderson)
To: simong@aifs.org.au
Subject: Re: Re-formatting an optical disk
Simon,
Here is the format.dat file that was supplied with my REO-1300, which
is a dual 650 unit. It should be exactly what you need. If I remember
correctly, you should use the format utility that came with the drive.
It is an extension of Sun's format program.
Thanks.
Mark Anderson
----------------------------------------------------------
The MITRE Corporation manderso@mitre.org
7525 Colshire Drive, MS W747 voice: (703) 883-6439
McLean, VA 22102 FAX: (703) 883-1951
------------------------------------------------------------------------
# File Id: @(#)reo.dat 1.4 89/06/13 SMI Consulting
#
# Format data for the Pinnacle Optical Erasable Disk, REO
#
# This file is in the same format as /etc/format.dat. If you wish, you
# may append the contents of this file to /etc/format.dat and replace
# /usr/etc/format with the appropriate reo_format.sunX program.
#
search_path = reo0,reo1
# The disk actually has 18751 tracks. Tracks 1 & 18750 are reserved, tracks 0
# & 18749 are Control Data Areas, tracks 2 & 3 are the Defect Table Area.
# Formatting sets 2048 sectors aside for sparing, and the controller takes
# another 1024, so we lose 3072, or 100 tracks, leaving 18645 user accessible
# tracks. There are actually 18645.9 tracks (578023 blocks), but I don't
# want to deal with partial tracks. And to cap it off, the format program
# likes to take the last 2 tracks for backup labels, so we actually end up
# with 18643 tracks (i.e. 18643*31*512 = 295.9Mbytes) per side to use.
disk_type = "Sony SMO-D501" \
: ctlr = CCS \
: ncyl = 18643 : acyl = 2 : pcyl = 18645 : nhead = 1 : nsect = 31 \
: rpm = 2400 : bpt = 23126
#
# This is the list of partition tables for the Sony SMO-C501 controller.
#
partition = "Sony SMO-D501" \
: disk = "Sony SMO-D501" : ctlr = CCS \
: a = 0, 31 : b = 0, 0 : c = 0, 577933 : g = 1, 577902
partition = "Sony SMO-D501, Sun3/4 sd partitions" \
: disk = "Sony SMO-D501" : ctlr = CCS \
: a = 0, 19995 : b = 645, 31992 : c = 0, 577933 : g = 1677, 525946
partition = "Sony SMO-D501, 386i sd partitions" \
: disk = "Sony SMO-D501" : ctlr = CCS \
: a = 0, 10788: b = 348, 31992 : c = 0, 577933 : g = 1380, 45136 : h = 2836, 490017
----- End Included Message -----
> To: sun-managers@ra.mcs.anl.gov
> Subject: Re-formatting an optical disk
>
> Dear Sun-Managers,
>
> # uname -a
> SunOS boxname 4.1.3 5 sun4m
>
> I'm attempting to re-format an optical disk on a Pinnacle Micro REO650
> optical drive. The disk was used to test the Legato NetWorker Archive
> software (looks like a good package) but is now required for another
> use. I mount the disk on a directory called /archive which normally
> looks like this:
>
> # ls -l
> ...
> drwx------ 2 root 512 Aug 14 16:19 archive
> ...
>
> but when mounted it looks like this:
>
> # mount /dev/reo0c /archive
> # ls -l
> ...
> ---------- 0 root 512 Aug 14 16:39 archive
> ...
>
> Usually, these optical disks look just like any other file system once
> they have been mounted. But if I try to cd to /archive the machine
> (a SPARCserver10) reboots.
>
> Legato tells me that I can use the format command to remove the
> contents but I need an /etc/format.dat entry for the drive. Does
> anyone have a format.dat entry for this kind of drive? Has anyone had
> any experience with this?
>
> Many thanks in advance, and I will summarize.
> Simon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:10:31 CDT