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Date:      Mon, 26 Nov 2012 13:13:10 -0800
From:      "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@tristatelogic.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Advanced Format Drive ?
Message-ID:  <15893.1353964390@tristatelogic.com>

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Just a brief follow-up on my questions here (about 2 weeks ago) regarding
so-called "Advanced Format" (4KB block) drives...

I just got myself a shiny new Seagate 2.5" portable external 1TB hard drive.
fdisk is telling me this about it:

===========================================================================
******* Working on device /dev/da1 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=121601 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=121601 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)

Media sector size is 512
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 7 (0x07),(NTFS, OS/2 HPFS, QNX-2 (16 bit) or Advanced UNIX)
    start 2048, size 1953519616 (953867 Meg), flag 0
        beg: cyl 0/ head 32/ sector 33;
        end: cyl 1023/ head 254/ sector 63
The data for partition 2 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
<UNUSED>
===========================================================================

Starting sector 2048 is definitely a multiple of 4KB, so I am assuming
that all I really need to do here in order to use this new drive as extra
stroage for a FreeBSD system (assuming that I am happy with good old
fashioned MBR style partitioning, which I am) is just:

    newfs -U /dev/da1s1

Right?

Last question:  How could I even tell if this thing is or isn't "Advanced
Format"?  Is there some tool I could run that would tell me that?



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