Re: how to change sector size on fibrechannel drives

[Douglas Gilbert <dougg@torque.net>]

David Nedved wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I've salvaged some drives from a MTI fibre channel RAID device, and I'm
> trying to use them in linux 2.4.18.  When the scsi module loads, it sees
> the drives, but reports them all as having the dreaded
> "unsupported sector size 528" message.  All the searches I've done seem
> to indicate a low-level format of the drives.   The FC card I'm using,
> however (Emulex LP8000), doesn't seem to have an option for low-level
> formatting in the BIOS.  I've also tried the lputil command that comes with
> the driver, but it seems to have trouble finding the adapter, and it doesn't
> seem to have any utilities that would help me anyway.
> 
> My fibre channel toys are rather limited, in other words, I don't have
> any other controllers with which to low-level these drives.  In a pinch
> I could probably find a wintel machine to throw the card into if I had to
> in order to low-level format the drives, but this would be rather hard
> since I don't have any windows machines.
> 
> Am I out of luck?  I wouldn't mind the inefficiency of only using 512
> of the 528 bytes in each block if there's some way to override the
> default setting... although I would much rather reformat them...
> 
> Oh, the drives are all ST136403FC drives if that matters.

David,
Have a look at the scu utility at this url:
http://www.bit-net.com/~rmiller/scu.html

You should be able to use the format to resize your sectors.

Doug Gilbert