Had some issues with the libata in 2.6.27 kernel's libata code, but believe the issues were fixed in the subsequent versions. Atleast one prominent issue was with a Western Digital HDD of 40 GB size. The manufacturer specific LBA was 78125000 and was reported as correctly in Win32 and DOS applications. But the 2.6.27 kernel was reporting ~40000 sectors more. But the problem dissappeared with the 2.6.3x kernel and I did not bother to check the patches due to lack of time. But still, the write's failure is not being seen by the application. I can understand the fact of not checking the media errors during the write operation, and had posted a request for a quick suggestions of the locations which needs to be changed / checked for the return value. ( Should it be handled at the vfs or at the libata code?). Will surely update the testing results with the new kernel (Well, not exactly as I am not using the latest version though! Currently trying with 2.6.31). Thank you all for suggestions. - SP On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> But really.. isn't "hdparm --security-erase NULL /dev/sdX" good enough ??? >> > > This thread seems to have died off. If there is a real problem, I > hope it picks back up. > > Mark, as to your question the few times I've tried that the bios on > the test machine blocked the command. So it may have some specific > utility, but it's a not a generic solution in my mind. > > Greg > -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href