You're right! (Re: 3B1/7300: iv does not support more than 1024 cyls)

[Lenny Tropiano]

In article <1976 at cadillac.CAD.MCC.COM> ned%cad at MCC.COM (Ned Nowotny) writes:
|In article <930 at icus.islp.ny.us> lenny at icus.islp.ny.us (Lenny Tropiano) writes:
|>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
...
|>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
...

|However, I did get a message with the technique I described complaining that
|>my description file wanted iv to format more than 1024 cylinders.  (While I
|>do not recall the exact wording, it was very clear what it was complaining
|>about.  Specifically, it referenced the number of cylinders and the fact that
|>I wanted it to format more than 1024.)  
...

My mistake... I was wrong! (Me wrong?) :-)  Well we're all allowed a mistake
once in a while.  At least I was the one who caught it! :-)  Anyhow, Ned is
absolutely correct in saying that 1024 is an hardcoded limit in /etc/iv.
Basically it checks to see if cylinders is between 0 and 1024.

The message you got was:

iv: cylinder count out of range in description file: <cylinder value>.

So I did a little investigating myself and managed to come up with a
binary patch to change the 1024 limit to 1400 (HDMAXCYL from <sys/gdisk.h>).
Note this is quite untested (as far as >1024 goes) since I don't have
a drive that large :-(   Anyone who wants to donate one, I'll be glad to
report the success (or not).   If anyone does try the patch, let me know
if it does work!

See program to patch iv to be posted to unix-pc.sources and comp.sys.att.

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