Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 07:33:38 -0700 (PDT) From: mla_strick@att.net To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Cc: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org Subject: Is fdisk broken? Message-ID: <20130322143338.36D368634@mist.localdomain>
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I recently bought a 4 TB usb disk drive and discovered that it reported a sector size of 4096 bytes instead of the traditional 512 bytes. This is apparently necessary because there may be a 32 bit sector number field somewhere in the usb mass storage protocols. It turns out that disk drive manufacturers have been producing disks with large sector sizes for some years now. The feature goes by the name "Advanced Format" and other things. Look it up in Wikipedia. FreeBSD seems to use the sector size information when interpreting MBR partition offsets and sizes. Unfortunately, when I try to use fdisk to print out the partition table on my new disk drive, fdisk just says "fdisk: could not detect sector size". Otherwise the MBR partition table seems to work correctly and newfs seems to have done the right thing. (It made the file system fragment size a multiple of the sector size and I am not getting any weird error messages out of the disk driver.) It would be nice if fdisk also worked. I do have to share the disk with other operating systems that might not understand other partition table schemes. Is may analysis of what is going on essentially correct? Can fdisk be made happy again? (At least for a few more years?) Dan Strick (mla_strick@att.net)
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