Re: MO problems...

Michael Eberl (Michael.Eberl@informatik.tu-muenchen.de)
Mon, 08 Jun 1998 16:03:21 +0200


Harvey Fishman wrote:
>
> Is it me, is it Linux, or is it Fujitsu? Does Linux support the Fujitsu
> M2513a MO drive with 640 MB media? It seems fine with 230 MB media, but
> the larger disks use 2048 byte sectors. The drive works fine with either
> under NT, but under Linux (2.1.102 or so) it told me that the drive was
> only about 150 some odd MB in size. I know there used to be 540 MB media
> (these have been discontinued by Fujitsu, though Maxell and some others may
> still make them) with 512 byte sectors, but I use the 640 MB disks. Has
> anyone made this work? If so, how? Thanks.
>

Hello,

I am using a M2513 device for more nearly a year now. There were
problems with the earlier 2.0.x Kernels, where 2048 byte sectors were
unsupported both in the SCSI drivers and the ext2 Filesystem. As far as
I know, everything should work with 2.0.34, and it will definitely work
under current 2.1.x kernels.

What I have never done is to partition the media - in my opinion using
more than one partition on MOs is futile - and changing between disks
with a different number of partitions could be hazardous to Windows, i
think :-)

So, to format MO's with VFAT filesystem I am using the windows-formatter
provided by fujitsu (to be found on their web-server), and I create a
superfloppy. Mounting these under linux works fine. (In case it doesn't
for you, make sure you are using current versions of all programs
involved)

Under Linux / ext2fs, create your filesystem with

mke2fs -m 0 -b 2048 /dev/sdX

Replace X with the correct value for your MO-Drive.
-m 0 tells ext2 not to reserve blocks for the superuser (pointless for
changeable media), -b 2048 adjusts the blocksize to 2048 bytes.
And ignore the warning that tells you that sdX is the whole device, not
just one partition, because that's exactly what you want.

Mount that with
mount -t ext2 /dev/sdX /mnt/mo

and everything should work fine (does for me, at least).

If you have further problems, feel free to contact me.

Michael Eberl

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