Re: [OT] SATA 3TB: unsupported sector size -1548812288.

On 01/09/11 19:40, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
On 8/31/2011 12:54 AM, Scott Ferguson wrote:

NOTE: I got well side-tracked here - I'm don't know whether the OP's
problem is partition table type, sector size (some new drives use large
sectors?) or some other reason.

Yes, quite so. Back on topic, this Red Hat bugzilla entry from May 2009
is informative, also dealing with kernel 2.6.18:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=502944

The problem in that case was resolved with a patch that:

"Adds support for 16 byte CDBs to the ibmvscsi driver."

As I already suggested, upgrading the kernel will fix the OP's problem.
I simply can't tell the OP how recent a kernel he needs as I don't know
which SATA driver he's using or in what kernel version that driver was
patched with 16 byte CBDs. Upgrading to 2.6.26, the default Lenny
kernel, would probably do the trick. Any Squeeze (2.6.32) kernel would
definitely not have this problem.


I don't/didn't know what the OP's problem was, and as I don't have a 3TB drive to test I'm not going to speculate (the OP can Google as well as I). :-)
I also assumed from his posting history that the OP didn't need me to tell him about the limitations of partition types - so I 'assumed' it was either a software issue related to handling a disk that size (filesystem bug), or an issue related to the large sector sizes of some of the new, very large, SATA drives.

I suspect you are correct about later kernels - I also wonder what limitations are specific to the i386/amd64 architecture.

The RedHat problem is interesting - though I'm not certain of it's relevance (which doesn't mean there aren't other, more relevant, problems). It's a 10TB partition in question - until *that* patch 12 byte CBDs were possible (6, 10, or, 12) - without digging up the CBD format I'd hazard a guess that 12 bytes would put the LBA limit around 2TB. These days the CBD size can be variable.
What's particularly interesting about that bug report is the date (2009) - I certainly was working with partitions larger than 2TB in 2006/7, which is some years before that bugreport (could be senility on my part).
NOTE: SCSI-3 was around in 2000 - and it's predecessor SCSI-2 supported 32 byte XOR commands... maybe a dig for SAM-2 specs would yield more. I also have a vague memory that bootablility further restricted the size of a partition somehow.

Cheers

--
"Oh sorry, I was taking life seriously."
— Bill Hicks


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