Re: [PATCH] libata: Don't trust current capacity values in identify words 57-58

Mark Lord
2009-02-16T23:01:20Z

> Hanno Böck reported a problem where an old Conner CP30254 240MB hard drive
> was reported as 1.1TB in capacity by libata:
>
> http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/2/13/134
>
> This was caused by libata trusting the drive's reported current capacity in
> sectors in identify words 57 and 58 if the drive does not support LBA and the
> current CHS translation values appear valid. Unfortunately it seems older
> ATA specs were vague about what this field should contain and a number of drives
> used values with wrong byte order or that were totally bogus. There's no
> unique information that it conveys and so we can just calculate the number
> of sectors from the reported current CHS values.
>
> Signed-off-by: Robert Hancock <hancockrwd@gmail.com>
..
> } else {
> if (ata_id_current_chs_valid(id))
> - return ata_id_u32(id, 57);
> + return id[54] * id[55] * id[56];
> else
> return id[1] * id[3] * id[6];
..

NAK. That's not quite correct, either.

The LBA capacity can be larger than the CHS capacity,
so we have to use the reported LBA values if at all possible.

That's why ata_id_is_lba_capacity_ok() exists,
and why it looks so peculiar.

Some of those early drives really did require that kind of logic.

Cheers