Ahh. Somebody else had the bright idea to use 512-byte sectors plus a few
bytes for identifying the sector in case of crash.
It's a rather good idea, IMHO, except that it creates problems left and
right. (Left: Most disks can only be reformatted witzh powers-of-two sizes,
right: disks with weird block sizes don't work most other places.)
It should be possible to modify the SCSI driver to r/w the excess data
from/to some Random Area, given either an adapter which can do
scatter/gather or somebody who is willing to copy the block around once
again, but there's a better solution: Reformat.
> this is an unsupported size; Linux allows only 256,512 and 1024-byte
> sectors. There are so many >>9 and <<9 in the code I really doubt it
> could be easily modified.
>
Besides, anything with a sector size != 512 won't boot with LILO.
> Anybody out there had prior encounters with such disks? Any ideas?
>
Yes. Get a reasonable SCSI control/formatting program and reformat the
thing with 512-byte sectors.
Don't ask me which program to use -- whenever I have that problem, I just
grab the Mac laptop and startup HDT, a rather nice program to control just
about everything your disk can do.
-- Matthias Urlichs