[ale] Seagate Hdd Not Lining Up!? -- Diverging from the problem...

[Tim Watts]

Hi,

Just out of curiosity, why doesn't the reported total bytes on the drive 
divide evenly by the bytes/cylinder? Where would those extra bytes reside if 
not on a cylinder? And why isn't the total == 320GB? (I suppose the answer to 
the last question is tied up in the bad sector map. But how do they keep those 
out of the usable cylinder space? Or do they?)

And OK, I'm not afraid to look totally stupid (but I'll qualify my question by 
saying it's been /years/ since I've stuck my head inside a drive): Am I to 
believe that these drives, which can't be more than 3/4" high, /really/ have 
255 platters spinning inside them with an arm between each platter? Or has the 
geometry all been virtualized today? If you tightly stacked 255 crisp $1 
bills, do you know how high it would be? I don't, but I'm pretty sure it'd be 
more than 3/4"! (BTW, if you do know, you're spending way too much time at the 
strip clubs.)

Thanks,
  Tim
  (who is awed by all this and just choc full o'questions)


On Saturday 11 July 2009 5:28:22 pm Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Jul 2009, Brian Pitts wrote:
> > Marc Ferguson wrote:
> > > [root at fergatron ~]# fdisk -l /dev/sdb
> >>
> >> Disk /dev/sdb: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
> >> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
> >> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> >> Disk identifier: 0x0b99f72f
> >>
> >>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> >> /dev/sdb1               1       38913   312568641   83  Linux
> >> [root at fergatron ~]#
> >>
> >> I'm not fully comprehending these outputs. Do they indicate anything of
> >> significance?
> >
> > That looks like one (roughly) 320 GB partition to me. You could try to
> > grow the filesystem by running the following as root
> >
> > umount /dev/sdb1
> > e2fcsk -f /dev/sdb1
> > resize2fs -p /dev/sdb1
> > mount /dev/sdb1 /media/backup
>
> If the kernel is recent enough, and the filesystem is extXfs, it should be
> growable online.
>
>  	--- Mike
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