how to format an ide hard disc in a usb enclosure

Julian Stacey jhs at berklix.org
Wed Sep 3 22:48:13 UTC 2008


Hi freebsd-scsi@,
How does one reformat an IDE disc in a USB enclosure appearing on
7.0-Release via devd as /dev/ da0 da0s1 da0s1a da0s1c pass1 ?

su
camcontrol devlist
  <MATSHITA UJDA730 DVD/CDRW 1.00>   at scbus2 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,cd0)
  <USB 2.0 Storage Device 0100>      at scbus3 target 0 lun 0 (pass1,da0)
camcontrol format da0
  You are about to REMOVE ALL DATA from the following device:
  camcontrol: scsiformat: error sending inquiry
camcontrol format 3:0:0
  You are about to REMOVE ALL DATA from the following device:
  camcontrol: scsiformat: error sending inquiry

Should I be using something from ports/ ? eg 

cd /usr/ports/sysutils/smartmontools ...
smartctl -i -T verypermissive  /dev/da0 
Device: USB 2.0  Storage Device   Version: 0100
>> Terminate command early due to bad response to IEC mode page
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.

cd /usr/ports/sysutils/sformat ... sformat -auto 0 0 3
...
Enter number of heads -1 (1 - 255)/<cr>:
	... too many questions I dont know answer to,
	I just want to reformat whole device.

Background
Yes, perhaps as the disc is throwing errors, it might be dieing,
&/or bad disc sector list might be full/ filling, but that doesn't
worry me: I had to power cycle it rapidly while travelling, might
have been the reason, &/or maybe USB hub didnt deliver enough power
then (despite doubler cable, thus 1.0A not 0.5A), but theres' nothing
vital on that disk, it's just a scratch space for experiments, so
I'd like to reformat.

Cheers,
Julian
--
Julian Stacey: BSDUnixLinux C Prog Admin SysEng Consult Munich www.berklix.com
  Mail plain ASCII text.  HTML & Base64 text are spam. www.asciiribbon.org


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