Failing to read drive: "Very big device. Trying to use READCAPACITY(16)"

From: martin f krafft
Date: Wed Aug 04 2010 - 04:27:33 EST


Dear kernel people,

We are trying to access the harddrive of a decomissioned laptop.
It's a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 320Gb SATA drive (WD3200BEVT¹,
625,142,448 sectors).

When we attach it via USB, however, the kernel fails to read its
size and assumes it's 2**32 blocks long (2 TiB):

kernel: [ 2466.318829] scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
kernel: [ 2466.319359] sd 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg9 type 0
kernel: [ 2466.323641] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdh] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).
kernel: [ 2466.325387] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdh] Using 0xffffffff as device size
kernel: [ 2466.325395] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdh] 4294967296 512-byte logical blocks: (2.19 TB/2.00 TiB)
kernel: [ 2466.326060] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdh] Write Protect is off
kernel: [ 2466.326063] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdh] Mode Sense: 00 38 00 00
kernel: [ 2466.326066] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdh] Assuming drive cache: write through
kernel: [ 2466.333816] sdh: unknown partition table
kernel: [ 2466.360579] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdh] Attached SCSI disk

If we attach it directly to the SATA bus, it is not detected.

Is there anything we can do, or is this drive simply lost?

¹) http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=377

--
martin | http://madduck.net/ | http://two.sentenc.es/

who's general failure, and why's he reading my disk?

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