Re: [PATCH 1/1] filesystem: Disk Errors at boot-time caused by probe of partitions

[Alan <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

On Thu, 01 Feb 2007 14:12:42 -0500
Phillip Susi <psusi@cfl.rr.com> wrote:

> I think you may be barking up the wrong tree because IIRC, these 
> requests for data beyond the end of the disk never make it to the drive; 
> the kernel fails them in the block layer.  There was a patch a while 
> back to fix the partition detection code to NOT request sectors beyond 
> the end of the disk, but I don't think it was ever merged.

ide-scsi and libata support this correctly. Ingo Molnar also ported the
recent CD changes related to size handling. None of these are relevant to
hard disks

> In any case, if you are sure the requests are making it to the drive and 
> causing damage, I hope you give Maxtor and IBM a sound thrashing for 
> using retarded firmware.

All the IBM and Maxtor drives I've played with correctly error when a
sector isn't available. It's pretty implausible they would do otherwise
as the "sector" is a logically mapping onto the drives internal file
system these days.

Fed a wrong sector any drive I know of will report that the sector cannot
be found.