We have a system of our own design based on the Intel 440BX chipset fitted with a PII-400, 64MB SDRAM, 4.3GB Quantum IDE hard drive, on board Adaptec AIC-7880 SCSI controller connected to a Sony SMO-F541SD magneto optical drive. When I try to create an EXT2 partition on the data cartridge on a 400MB partition (650MB per side 1.3GB total and according to Sony 1024 bytes per sector) using the command 'mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sda1' the following information is reported: First data block = 1 Block size = 1024 Fragment size = 1024 101 block groups 8192 blocks per group 8192 fragments per group 2040 inodes per group After creating the 101 inodes when it starts to write the superblocks and filesystem accounting information the following error message is output for a large number of sectors... scsidisk I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 1277964 SCSI disk error: host 0 channel 0 id 3 lun 0 return code 28000002 Current error sd08:01 sense key illegal request Additional sense indicates logical block address out of range. If I create an identical sized partition on the 1.2GB cartridge (600MB total per side - 512 bytes per sector) then I have no problems. Also I have no problems using either cartridge size on a system running RedHat 4.0 If I issue the mkfs command from a text based console (CTRL- ALT-F1) then the command fails with the error as shown above. However, if I run the command from an Xterm within FVWM X-Windows then the command will work successfully. Having had the failure with the standard Red Hat 6.0 installation I upgraded the kernel to 2.2.10 using a full download of source from ftp.kernel.org and this exhibits the same problems.
Further investigation shows that when using the 1.2GB cartridge (with 512 byte sectors) mkfs works correctly and reports block size as 1024 and fragment size 1024. According to comments in the kernel source (SD.C) the block size is twice the sector size - in which case for the 1.3GB cartridge this should report 2048. Also with the 1.3GB cartridge when running mkfs it reports making 156 inode tables which I believe to be twice the number required.