SUMMARY: Disk will not NEWFS

From: Phill St-Louis (phill2@hivnet.ubc.ca)
Date: Thu Mar 11 1993 - 14:00:23 CST


My original message:
> We have a Seagate Elite III ST43400ND 2.9GB. I was fool enough
> to trust the company that I bought this from. The drive is a differntial
> SCSI-2 that is connected to a Performance Technologies differential
> SCSI adaptor on a Sun 630/MP.
>
> I formatted the drive with the following FORMAT.DAT settings:
>
> disk_type = "DDI SEAGATE Elite III ST43400ND" \
> : ctlr = SCSI : fmt_time = 4 \
> : trks_zone = 21 : asect = 6 : atrks = 21 \
> : ncyl = 2736 : acyl = 2 : pcyl = 2738 : nhead = 21 : nsect = 98 \
> : rpm = 5400 : bpt = 49000
>
> The thing formats fine, but when I try to NEWFS the partition:
>
> newfs /dev/rsd6g
>
> seek error: 5507207
> wtfs: Error 0
>
> Here is the output from newfs -Nv /dev/rsd6g:
>
> mkfs -N /dev/rsd6g 5507208 98 21 8192 1024 16 10 90 2048 t 0 0 8 7
> /dev/rsd6g: 5507208 sectors in 2676 cylinders of 21 tracks, 98 sectors
> 2819.7MB in 168 cyl groups (16 c/g, 16.86MB/g, 7744 i/g)
> super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
> 32, 33072, 66112, 99152, 132192, 165232, 198272, 231312, 264352,
> 297392, 330432, 363472, etc
>
> Here is the partition table:
>
> Current partition table (original sd6):
> partition a - starting cyl 0, # blocks 0 (0/0/0)
> partition b - starting cyl 0, # blocks 123480 (60/0/0)
> partition c - starting cyl 0, # blocks 5630688 (2736/0/0)
> partition d - starting cyl 0, # blocks 0 (0/0/0)
> partition e - starting cyl 0, # blocks 0 (0/0/0)
> partition f - starting cyl 0, # blocks 0 (0/0/0)
> partition g - starting cyl 60, # blocks 5507208 (2676/0/0)
> partition h - starting cyl 0, # blocks 0 (0/0/0)
>
> Is this drive unusable, as in being too large for a Sun?
>
> Thanks for any leads.

Well, the drive was certainly useable, but partition g was too large
for SunOS 4.1.2. There is a ~2GB limit on the size of a file system.

Jay Lessart wrote:

    Files and file systems use signed ints for addressing and data
    structures, at least in SunOS, SVR3, SVR4, etc. So maximum file size
    or file system size is: 2^^31 = 2,147,483,648 bytes.

    This also hits you in terms of the maximum tar/cpio/dump you can
    write.

One person responded by saying that he was successful with a 3GB partition
in Solaris 2.1.

Some people suggested looking for patches. I had looked at this and did
not find anything relevant. There are no patches for this problem.

Others suggested Online DiskSuite, which allows file systems of up to
1 TB and file systems that spread across several physical disks.
 
Thanks to all of the responders.
 
Phill St-Louis
University of British Columbia



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