3B1/7300: iv does not support more than 1024 cylinders

[Lenny Tropiano]

In article <1942 at cadillac.CAD.MCC.COM> ned%cad at MCC.COM (CME Ned Nowotny) writes:
...
|>Well, it turns out that iv, just like the stock s4diag, has the 1024
|>cylinder limit of the stock hardware hard coded.  I was able to get
|>iv to try a format of my (one and only) hard disk by creating a
|>floppy disk boot file system with the iv program included, making a
|>link of /dev/rfp000 to /dev/rhd, and preparing a description file
|>for my disk.  The link allowed me to try and format the hard disk
|>without getting the complaint that iv will not format the hard disk.
|>However, iv refused to format the disk when it encountered the 1170
|>cylinder entry in my description file.
|>
As far as I can tell formatting >1024 cylinders with the iv command should
work, only on the second drive.  iv will not let you format anything
with the "type" description line in the description file being "HD".  It
just will come back with the message:

	iv: cannot reformat Winchester disk.

Now if you changed that line to "HD2 or SY" it might work provided you
gave slice 0 of the raw disk drive 1.   The iv program doesn't look
at the device name (ie. /dev/rfp000), but it looks at the major/minor number
and how you specify the "type" in the description file.   There should
be no hard limit to the number of cylinders that you can specify, although
I cannot test this myself (both my drives have 1024 cyls).  If I have 
the EXACT message maybe we can check into the problem and get it corrected.
I'll see what we can do about allowing formatting of the first drive with
iv (of course you would be REQUIRED to boot off floppy).

-Lenny
-- 
Lenny Tropiano             ICUS Software Systems         [w] +1 (516) 589-7930
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