Non-512-byte sector drive cloning?

[Warner Losh]

> On Feb 11, 2015, at 5:58 PM, Lyle Bickley <lbickley at bickleywest.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 11 Feb 2015 18:04:58 -0500 (EST)
> Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, 11 Feb 2015, Roe Peterson wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Feb 11, 2015, at 4:16 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> On Wed, 11 Feb 2015, Al Kossow wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On 2/11/15 1:56 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
>>>>>> netbooting NetBSD (install doable for that one.)
>>>>> 
>>>>> You'll need to put something together that can talk to the raw
>>>>> scsi interface and issue your own read commands. Are they common
>>>>> command set drives?
>>>> 
>>>> Should be.  I don't believe CompuServe did anything too silly.
>>> 
>>> What, actually, is the blocksize?  1024 or ?
>>> 
>> 
>> 576 or 2304.
> 
> The "scu" utility, which is available for both NT and linux
> environments can change the blocksize - and scads of other parameters
> on most SCSI disks. It's powerful enough that you can brick a drive
> if you're not careful ;)
> 
> I used to buy NOS Tandem SCSI HDD dirt cheap because they had a weird
> blocksize that would make Windows/Linux systems barf. I would then
> use "scu" to change the blocksize parameter of the drive to 512 - and do
> a low level format. Then I'd have a "standard" SCSI HDD for a fraction
> of the price of a "standard" drive.
> 
> Of course you could change the blocksize of a drive to 576 - or
> anything you wanted - and then do a low level format for that blocksize.
> 
> You can pickup scu for NT and linux (including help and summary pdfs)
> by anonymous ftp to my website via certain browsers or:
> 
> ftp bickleywest.com
> user: anonymous
> password: your email address
> cd scu
> ….

Isn’t the scu utility a data-destructive one, which would be, ummm, really bad for
recovering the data from these drives?

Warner