Charles M. Hannum writes:
> 
> 
>    > While I'm thinking of it, does the FreeBSD scsi utility, or any other
>    > SCSI utility, offer the ability to reformat drives with 1KB sectors?
> 
>    I don't have the spec right here.  I think it amounts to (with the
>    FreeBSD utility)
> 
>    scsi -f /dev/rsd0.ctl -e 3 -P 3        # Manually edit the format
> 					  #  device page to set sector size.
>    scsi -f /dev/rsd0.ctl -c "4 0 0 0 0 0" # Format.
> 
>    "-P 3" select parameter set 3, the permanent ones.
> 
> Careful readers will note that this interface really *sucks*, and it's
> very easy to do something completely different than you intended.

OK, So I will post to a NetBSD list again.  Then back to FreeBSD
lists, where I elected to go the first place since Charles is so obnoxious.
Anyone who missed the FreeBSD-NetBSD split now is lucky enough to catch
a little picture of why in my opinion it happened.

I hesitated in posting to a NetBSD list.  I guess I didn't hesitate
long enough.

The interface may *suck*, but it is convenient when you are testing
things out.  The mode edit (-e 3) isn't bad at all, it throws you into
an edit screen that looks like this:

> AWRE (Auto Write Reallocation Enbld):  1
> ARRE (Auto Read Reallocation Enbld):  1
> TB (Transfer Block):  0
> EER (Enable Early Recovery):  0
> PER (Post Error):  0
> DTE (Disable Transfer on Error):  0
> DCR (Disable Correction):  0
> Read Retry Count:  18
> Correction Span:  11
> Write Retry Count:  18

Which not only doesn't "*suck*" but is down right user-friendly.

Sending arbitrary CDB's from the command line is handy.  I'm not
sure what is so "*suck*"y about the interface; I guess Charles has
used it and found it a pain in the neck that everything within the
quotes is in hex and everything outside in decimal.  It is annoying, but
you get use to it, and you can send anything you want during testing
and then move it into the driver or, like the scsiformat script I have,
into a script.  You should always be careful when sending CDB's to
a device.  Which systems have less "*suck*"y interfaces?

I look forward to Charles's implementation so that I may learn at the
feet of the master.

Peter

-- 
Peter Dufault               Real Time Machine Control and Simulation
HD Associates, Inc.         Voice: 508 433 6936
dufault@hda.com             Fax:   508 433 5267