Retrieving disk geometry

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Mon Jun 2 07:44:51 PDT 2003


In message <20030603001755.S68271-100000 at starbug.ugh.net.au>, Andrew writes:
>Hi,
>
>Under FreeBSD 4.x the ioctl DIOCGDINFO could be used to retrieve the
>number of cylinders, heads and sectors of a drive. This could be called on
>/dev/ad0 for example. Under FreeBSD 5 it seems to produce "Inappropriate
>ioctl for device" unless you call it on an individual partition
>(/dev/ad0s1a for example).
>
>Is there a way around this?

Use the ioctls you find in <sys/disk.h> they should work on all
disk devices.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


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