Imaging SCSI hard disks

Patrick Finnegan pat at computer-refuge.org
Thu Sep 2 00:12:58 CDT 2004


On Wednesday 01 September 2004 22:30, der Mouse wrote:
> Well, devices _are_ often special in various ways.  Most notably
> here, disk devices normally do not support accesses that are not a
> multiple of the sector size, aligned on sector boundaries.  (Since
> most emulators don't try to do anything else with disks, they
> probably will work fine.  This is partly just general misimpression
> correcting, but also partly because you may run into trouble if you
> try to use something like a CD - the CD blocksize is fundamentally
> 2352, which turns into 2K for a data CD (the other 304 bytes going
> for ECC and suchlike), and many CD drives don't support sub-2K
> accesses, meaning you may not be able to use a CD to back even a
> read-only disk.)

A proper OS device driver will figure out that you're not 
reading/writing a whole block (or on a block boundary), and give you 
back or modify only what's required, when using a read()/write() 
syscall or fread()/fwrite(). :)

Pat
-- 
Purdue University ITAP/RCS        ---  http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcs/
The Computer Refuge               ---  http://computer-refuge.org



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