5 Nov
2010
5 Nov
'10
11 a.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
On 11/5/10, Dave McGuire <mcguire at
neurotica.com> wrote:
It's a bit more murky than that (albeit a related issue) because a lot of the
bridge boards expect a vendor-specific command to tell them the drive geometry
of the attached drive, and there's no opportunity for the system drivers to
inject the necessary command.
I did have a look at adding such a facility to Linux a few years ago - kind of
"at init, consult list and throw these params at device xxx via vendor command
yyy" - but looking at the spaghetti that is the Linux kernel source is
probably what gave me so many grey hairs ;-)
I've got a *lot* of stuff that just won't talk to a modern system. It's either
almost-SCSI (i.e. lacking inquiry or other quirks), or SASI. I got most of the
way through building my own interface board that I could just drive from my
own software, but that was the point I moved to the US, and it's all still in
storage back in the UK.
cheers
Jules
Preserving/snapshotting the contents of a SCSI
drive is as simple as
hooking it to a UNIX box and running a "dd" command.
For drives that have 512-bytes-per-block (which is most of them),
that's true, but there is the kink that really early SCSI devices,
specifically many non-embedded drive controllers with attached drives
(commonly MFM or ESDI) don't support the SCSI INQUIRE packet, so can't
be easily connected to modern Linux/UNIX boxes. Probably nearly
everything made since about 1990, though, "plug it in and use dd"
works great.