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Date:      Thu, 4 Jan 1996 00:08:30 +1030 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        phk@critter.tfs.com (Poul-Henning Kamp)
Cc:        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, bde@zeta.org.au, jkh@time.cdrom.com, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, obrien@cs.ucdavis.edu
Subject:   Re: X for install
Message-ID:  <199601031338.AAA07790@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <1255.820673180@critter.tfs.com> from "Poul-Henning Kamp" at Jan 3, 96 01:46:20 pm

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Poul-Henning Kamp stands accused of saying:
> > There are a few "better" ways perhaps to look for more unique things,
> > but you'll still be screwed by two identical disks with identical
> > contents 8(
> 
> Well my idea was something like:
> 
> 	sector = 0
> 	while (1)
> 		for all disks the bios knows about
> 			read $sector
> 			update checksum[disk]
> 		if checksums differ
> 			store checksum[] & $sector
> 		sector++


Two 1G disks, one IDE, one SCSI.  Both (miraculously) have identical 
MBR's, and no contents.  (Think scrubbed disks)

Or two identical recently-low-level-formatted disks on a single SCSI
controller in the presence of ID hardwiring.  Or even the same disks
after they've been labelled and have identical filesystems on them.

And how much of the disk are you going to read before you give up?
(Yes, I know a better approach would be to scatter the reads exponentially
across the disk)

The problem is not the general case, it's the worst case.  I guess the
question is whether the worst case is worth worrying about... 8)

> Poul-Henning Kamp           | phk@FreeBSD.ORG       FreeBSD Core-team.

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au    [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au   [[
]] High-speed data acquisition and      (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496       [[
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