Archiving workstation hard drives

[Brad Parker]

Jules Richardson wrote:
>Brad Parker wrote:
>>> When I've done this, though, I've written my own disc dumping code using SC
>SI
>>> command blocks to the low-level interface.
>> 
>> yes, I found linux to be incapable of dealing with scsi disks formatted
>> to non-512 byte multiple blocks...
>
>That does surprise me. I can well believe that certain filesystems won't work 
>except at a fixed (typically 512) byte block size, but with my other post in 
>mind about CDROM drives I would have expected the low-level access to stand a 
>reasonable chance of working.
>
>I wonder what the problem is - I hope there's not some hack in there which 
>runs along the lines of "if it's a non-removeable mass storage device then we 
>expect it to use 512 bytes per block only".

there's a case statement in the code which....  ah yes:

...
		if (sector_size != 512 &&
		    sector_size != 1024 &&
		    sector_size != 2048 &&
		    sector_size != 4096 &&
		    sector_size != 256) {
			printk("%s : unsupported sector size %d.\n",
			       nbuff, sector_size);
...

Pretty much hard codes it.  (this from a 2.4.29 kernel - 2.6.x is the same)

-brad