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Hi all.
I'm tring to format an external USB hd on my Sun Blade 2000 WS.
The disc itself is attached to a USB 2 PCI card and the format says:
"Formatting cannot be interrupted
and takes 9188 minutes (estimated). Continue? yes"
My question is: have you ever experienced such a long time to format a
disc?
I believe this is a "low level format", but,... it is a LONG wait!
Thanks.
Kind regards.
Patata Kid wrote:[color=blue]
> Hi all.
> I'm tring to format an external USB hd on my Sun Blade 2000 WS.
> The disc itself is attached to a USB 2 PCI card and the format says:
>
> "Formatting cannot be interrupted
> and takes 9188 minutes (estimated). Continue? yes"
>
> My question is: have you ever experienced such a long time to format a
> disc?
> I believe this is a "low level format", but,... it is a LONG wait!
>
> Thanks.
>
> Kind regards.
>
>
>[/color]
For scsi disks the format command does nothing but data erase and test.
The format command is retranslated by the disk, one thinks a format is
executed.
I think it's the same for an ide/sata drive.
Low level formatting is no more, except for floppies.
/Jorgen
Patata Kid wrote:[color=blue]
> Hi all.
> I'm tring to format an external USB hd on my Sun Blade 2000 WS.
> The disc itself is attached to a USB 2 PCI card and the format says:
>
> "Formatting cannot be interrupted
> and takes 9188 minutes (estimated). Continue? yes"
>
> My question is: have you ever experienced such a long time to format a
> disc?
> I believe this is a "low level format", but,... it is a LONG wait!
>
> Thanks.
>
> Kind regards.
>
>
>[/color]
How big is the disk? 9100 minutes seems a little extreme but if the
disk is 900 GB, it might just take that long to do a low level format.
It's rather unusual to have to do a low level format; it's usually done
at the factory and need not be repeated.
Patata Kid wrote:[color=blue]
> Hi all.
> I'm tring to format an external USB hd on my Sun Blade 2000 WS.
> The disc itself is attached to a USB 2 PCI card and the format says:
>
> "Formatting cannot be interrupted
> and takes 9188 minutes (estimated). Continue? yes"
>
> My question is: have you ever experienced such a long time to format a
> disc?[/color]
Saw something like that once on Windows, where the USB 2 flash disk was
plugged into a motherboard USB port, and those were restricted to USB 1
speeds.
In other words, it may be that for some reason your system sees the
disk as a USB 1 device. You say it's a USB 2 PCI card, does Solaris see
it as such?
Regards,
David Mathog
On Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:20:34 -0800, David Mathog wrote:
Thanks for all your answers.
Actually, the whole thing is very strange.
The disc itself is a normal 320Gb Lacie disc, and I used it for a long
time without any problem with this WS (my Blade 2000).
BUT, last week I unplugged it from the Blade 2000 because I needed to use
it on my Windows PC.
I had to reformat it to create an NTFS filesystem; after this
operation, I can no more format it with Solaris.
It is seen by the kernel, and indeed I can create a ZFS on it (it is very
fast, BTW) but I can no longer have it working via UFS + the automounter.
I don't know what to think.
P.S. I believe it is seen as a USB 2.0 device, in fact dmesg shows:
Nov 11 19:38:09 asgard usba: [ID 912658 kern.info] USB 2.0 device (usb59f,651)
operating at hi speed (USB 2.x) on USB 2.0 root hub: storage@2, scsa2usb2 at
bus address 2
Nov 11 19:38:09 asgard usba: [ID 349649 kern.info] LaCie Hard Drive
USB 10000E000D8CDAE3 Nov 11 19:38:09 asgard genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info]
scsa2usb2 is /pci@8,700000/usb@2,2/storage@2 Nov 11 19:38:09 asgard
genunix: [ID 408114 kern.info] /pci@8,700000/usb@2,2/storage@2 (scsa2usb2)
online Nov 11 19:38:10 asgard scsi: [ID 193665 kern.info] sd1 at
scsa2usb2: target 0 lun 0
[color=blue]
> Patata Kid wrote:[color=green]
>> Hi all.
>> I'm tring to format an external USB hd on my Sun Blade 2000 WS.
>> The disc itself is attached to a USB 2 PCI card and the format says:
>>
>> "Formatting cannot be interrupted
>> and takes 9188 minutes (estimated). Continue? yes"
>>
>> My question is: have you ever experienced such a long time to format a
>> disc?[/color]
>
> Saw something like that once on Windows, where the USB 2 flash disk was
> plugged into a motherboard USB port, and those were restricted to USB 1
> speeds.
>
> In other words, it may be that for some reason your system sees the
> disk as a USB 1 device. You say it's a USB 2 PCI card, does Solaris see
> it as such?
>
> Regards,
>
> David Mathog[/color]
Patata Kid wrote:[color=blue]
> On Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:20:34 -0800, David Mathog wrote:
>
> Thanks for all your answers.
>
> Actually, the whole thing is very strange.
> The disc itself is a normal 320Gb Lacie disc, and I used it for a long
> time without any problem with this WS (my Blade 2000).
>
> BUT, last week I unplugged it from the Blade 2000 because I needed to use
> it on my Windows PC.
> I had to reformat it to create an NTFS filesystem; after this
> operation, I can no more format it with Solaris.
>
> It is seen by the kernel, and indeed I can create a ZFS on it (it is very
> fast, BTW) but I can no longer have it working via UFS + the automounter.
>
> I don't know what to think.
>
> P.S. I believe it is seen as a USB 2.0 device, in fact dmesg shows:
>
> Nov 11 19:38:09 asgard usba: [ID 912658 kern.info] USB 2.0 device (usb59f,651)
> operating at hi speed (USB 2.x) on USB 2.0 root hub: storage@2, scsa2usb2 at
> bus address 2
> Nov 11 19:38:09 asgard usba: [ID 349649 kern.info] LaCie Hard Drive
> USB 10000E000D8CDAE3 Nov 11 19:38:09 asgard genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info]
> scsa2usb2 is /pci@8,700000/usb@2,2/storage@2 Nov 11 19:38:09 asgard
> genunix: [ID 408114 kern.info] /pci@8,700000/usb@2,2/storage@2 (scsa2usb2)
> online Nov 11 19:38:10 asgard scsi: [ID 193665 kern.info] sd1 at
> scsa2usb2: target 0 lun 0
>
>
>[/color]
Format on M$-Windows is equal to newfs in unix, not format in unix.
The format you did for ntfs, just created a new filesystem not formatting.
Modern disk do not allow low-level format !, they try to fool the OS.
/Jörgen