can not format drive question
u903...@spawnkill.ip-mobilphone.net
to format them it i says:
cannot format this drive. Please use manufacturer supplied formatting
utility.
I do not have these utilities. what utilities are these?.
in "format" the disk 0 and 1 are:
c0t0d0 ...<ST3910A..
c0t1d0 ...<ST39120..
what is the work around?.
what should i do?.
Sam
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Steve
This was in the context of Intel machines, but it should apply here too.
Why do you want to format the drives?
Pam Pledger
- The is a OS/firmware problem in the ATA IDE chain.
- The Disks are not recognized by Sun.
- The disks are bad.
If it's a ATA IDE chain problem, it could be almost anything: ide
cables too long, not connected properly, corrupt driver, etc. I doubt
that this is the problem, but you might want to open up the box,
double check the cables, and reboot.
The most likely problem would be bad disks. Sun can typically have
new disks to you the next day.
In Sun hardware, it's always best to use Sun Supplied hardware, or
hardware setup to be installed into a Sun system. I'd advise against
using something off the shelf at the local PC store, not matter if it
might work or not.
If they are disks not recognized by OS, the format information needs
to be entered in the kernel driver conf file or the format command.
PC and Sun hardware typically call the same information by slightly
different names, and the full capacity of the drive may not be
available by entering in the data by hand. But it's done fairly
often, especially with new disks, or old Sun hardware. Sometimes new
bootprom firmware is needed, but I doubt that is the case in this
instance. What the driver and format command would need are the
speed, number of cylinders, number of platters, the drive's "type"
(supplied by the drive), and a unique name. Storing this in formation
in the format.dat or driver conf file means that the information can
be copied to other machines and used on other disks without going
through format.
This is not something that should be done if there is another
alternative because errors in the entry can make the disk unstable,
and small errors may cause corruption after the disk is already in
use.
If you would post the exact drive information (MFR, Size, # Cyl, #
Platters, speed (rps) ) and O/S specs (Solaris Version, Linux
Version), the exact information can be posted back.
u903...@spawnkill.ip-mobilphone.net (sol_...@hotmail.com) wrote in message news:<l.1009228604.1537658691@[63.127.215.130]>...
Bruce Adler
"Pam Pledger" <pamela...@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:a160026e.02011...@posting.google.com...
> u903...@spawnkill.ip-mobilphone.net (sol_...@hotmail.com) wrote in message news:<l.1009228604.1537658691@[63.127.215.130]>...
> > I have an ultra10. It apprently has two disks <IDE>. when i try
> > to format them it i says:
> > cannot format this drive. Please use manufacturer supplied formatting
> > utility.
> > I do not have these utilities. what utilities are these?.
> > in "format" the disk 0 and 1 are:
> > c0t0d0 ...<ST3910A..
> > c0t1d0 ...<ST39120..
> >
> > what is the work around?.
> > what should i do?.
> There are several causes of the problem:
> - The is a OS/firmware problem in the ATA IDE chain.
> - The Disks are not recognized by Sun.
> - The disks are bad.
NO! None of those guesses are correct and in fact there's no problem
whatsoever. The only problem is that the message printed by the
format program is unnecessarily misleading. The correct workaround is
to ignore the message and don't bother trying to "format" an ATA disk.
Just re-label them or just modify the VTOC to suit your needs.
ATA disks are pre-formatted at the factory and can *NOT* be re-formatted
by a user. That's basically all you need to know and remember. (SCSI
disks are also nowadays all pre-formatted at the factory and do not
require a re-format, but some people's habits are hard to change and
they unnecessarily and incorrectly insist on re-formatting SCSI drives).
Some drive vendors do provide a DOS utility that will re-write the data
areas of every sector, but those utilities do *NOT* do anything like a
format operation that can be done on a SCSI disk. And, simply
re-writing the data areas does *NOT* accomplish anything useful, nor
is it required or appropriate when installing a new disk drive.
For reasons I can't understand or explain, when I originally gave the
above information to the Sun SPARC engineer that added the bogus
message to the format program (about 4 to 5 years ago while Sun was
developing the Ultra 5/10 boxes), rather than fixing format to print
some sort of meaningful message that explained that attempting to
"format" an ATA disk wasn't necessary or supported, he fixated on the
fact that I happened to mention there was a vendor-supplied DOS program
that did something completely different. So he ended replacing a
error message which was vaguely cryptic (I don't recall exactly what it
used to print but it was something like "invalid ioctl"), with a
message that was completely misleading and no less cryptic.