> >Perhaps the kernel should try reading beyond the ends of disks when it >detects them, so that it can determine if there's actually available >storage there, and automatically increase the size if there is? Or, at >least, it could check whether the medium actually goes out to the point >the partition table implies, and suppress the I/O error if the disk >actually ends where it claims to. > Sounds like a good idea. In fact, I had miscreated a sun disklabel on a disk because it has a slightly different notion of cylinders that I am used to from x86; IOW: dmesg: SCSI device sdb: 35378533 512-byte hdwr sectors (18114 MB) fdisk: Disk /dev/sdb (Sun disk label): 19 heads, 248 sectors, 7200 rpm 7508 cylinders, 2 alternate cylinders, 7510 physical cylinders 0 extra sects/cyl, interleave 1:1 (should have been 7506 cyl, 2 alt, 7508 phys) And Solaris rightfully barfs about it when scanning disks, because 7510*19*248 > 35378533. Linux keeps silent, and I am not sure if I have a silent data corruption there (currently not as it seems). (Since it's just a test box ATM, it's not critical.) Jan Engelhardt -- - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
