At 11:09 PM 6/3/2002 +0200, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
>On Mon, Jun 03, 2002 at 12:49:34PM -0700, Bill Studenmund wrote:
>> [...]
>> 
>> The main locus of the question is what have people been doing so far when
>> they use non-512-byte sectors? Yes, we have hacks for CDs. But what have
>> the MO folks been doing? Any MO users who can speak up?
>
>Well, all the MO I have have 512-byte blocks. I'm not sure there is
>that much MO drives with larger block size.
>
... and many many responses ...

Wow!  I didn't expect there would be so much chatter simply on the
*existence* (or prevalence) of drives with large sectors.  I'm just
interested in what we can do to support them.

For the record, I have two Fujitsu DynaMO's: one 230MB, which uses 512-byte
sectors, and the other 640MB, which uses 2048-byte sectors for 640MB disks,
and 512-byte sectors for smaller capacity disks.  I also have a Creative
DVD-RAM drive, which uses 2048-byte sectors on DVD-RAM disks (2.6GB capacity).

If you want my answer to Bill's question: years ago I tried patching NetBSD
to work with 2048-byte sector disks, but failed, and eventually gave up.  I
found that NeXTSTEP 3.0 (68k cube) could handle the media very well, so I
used that for a while.  When I upgraded my PC I checked the status of
NetBSD support for large sectors again, found it still didn't work; tried
it on FreeBSD, but couldn't get the DVD drive working at all; tried it on
Linux, and found that it worked there, so I switched.  Several months later
-- too late -- I discovered that Linux support for large sector disks has a
bad bug in it, and some of my backup files were lost.  I really didn't care
for Linux anyway.  Now I want to switch back to NetBSD, so I'm trying to
patch it again.

Too bad NeXTSTEP is a proprietary OS; that's the only OS I've tried that
works reliably with my MO drive, and it would be interesting to see how
they implemented their file system and disk drivers.  I wonder if anyone
has tried using a large sector disk in Mac OS X? ...

-----------------------
Trevin Beattie          "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards,
trevin@xmission.com     for you are crunchy and good with ketchup."
      {:->                                     --unknown