From owner-freebsd-scsi Mon Oct 19 08:32:06 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id IAA15839 for freebsd-scsi-outgoing; Mon, 19 Oct 1998 08:32:06 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from sasami.jurai.net (sasami.jurai.net [207.153.65.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id IAA15833 for ; Mon, 19 Oct 1998 08:32:04 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from winter@jurai.net) Received: from localhost (winter@localhost) by sasami.jurai.net (8.8.8/8.8.7) with SMTP id LAA13198; Mon, 19 Oct 1998 11:31:05 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 11:31:04 -0400 (EDT) From: "Matthew N. Dodd" To: Joerg Wunsch cc: scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Strange error In-Reply-To: <19981019085446.46449@uriah.heep.sax.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Mon, 19 Oct 1998, J Wunsch wrote: > As Matthew N. Dodd wrote: > > "Format Unit Command (04H) > > Initializes the optical disk surface. An unformated Write-Once disk can > > be formatted only once." > > Oh, that's a write-once medium. I thought it were an M-O one. No, they're qualifying the 'format unit command'. The paragraph should be read as: "rewritable MO media may be formatted as you like; wrinte once MO media can be formatted only once." MO media, while hard sectored, have error correction, bad block maps and other information that must be initializd by a low level format. I'd venture to say that since the media is all common b/t the various 5 1/4" MO drives they all may be low level formatted. I have no experience with 3 1/2" MO drives; frankly they're capacity is so small as to be useless. The only saving feature about the 650 meg MO media is that its quite nearly the size of a CD and works well for arranging CD volumes. -- | Matthew N. Dodd | 78 280Z | 75 164E | 84 245DL | FreeBSD/NetBSD/Sprite/VMS | | winter@jurai.net | This Space For Rent | ix86,sparc,m68k,pmax,vax | | http://www.jurai.net/~winter | Are you k-rad elite enough for my webpage? | To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message