NAME

ifmt − format IPI disks

SYNOPSIS

/etc/ifmt [ −Xdvl ] [ −Vn ] [ −D cyl/hd ] /dev/rdsk/iXdYvh

DESCRIPTION

The program ifmt is provided to format IPI disks. IPI disks may only be formatted with 2048 byte sectors, and only Seagate ST1154MK drives are supported. The normal action of ifmt is to retrieve a vendor defect list from the IPI drive, attempt to retrieve a Field defect list from the drive’s volume directory, reformat the IPI drive, do track replacement out of a designated area from the disk in order to map out bad spots on the disk, create a reasonable volume header, and then store any known Field defects pointed to by an entry in the volume header’s volume directory area (the name of the defect list will be ipidef in the volume directory list). 

ifmt must be run by root (super user), but may be run while the system is operating in multi-user mode. It should be noted that only minimal checking is done by the system in using this tool, so caution should be exercised in order to avoid formatting mounted filesystems and the like. 

The disk volume to format is the Yth disk on the Nth IPI controller. 

ARGUMENTS

The following flags may be optionally used with ifmt:

−X Ignore any failures at reading the field defect list from the front of the disk. This option should only be necessary in case the improper use of dvhtool(1M) caused the field defect list be garbaged (the list is protected by a checksum which ifmt stringently checks).  ifmt will tell you when the −X flag is required. 

−l Just list the known Vendor and Field defects. No formatting or media verification will be done. Even though this option seems relatively non-invasive, the same cautions about using ifmt with this option and using ifmt while formatting must be observed. This is due to the fact that the default sector size of the disk has to be changed briefly in order to extract the Vendor defect list. 

−v This flag turns on an incredibly verbose output. 

−d This flag turns on even more output. 

−Vn This separate option sets the number of verification passes ifmt will perform after formatting the disk. This value defaults to one pass. Each pass, up to eight passes, will use a different byte pattern from the set 0xA5, 0x5A, 0x55, 0xAA, 0xF0, 0x0F, 0xFF and 0.  The verification pass consists of writing all cylinders on the disk with the data pattern, reading each cylinder back, and if an error occurs on the readback (either on the read itself, or in a data compare), an attempt will be made to isolate the track with the potential bad spot. All tracks that appear to have a potential or an actual bad spot, and are not already in the Vendor or Field defect lists, will be added to the Field defect list. 

−D cyl/hd
This separate option may be used to manually specify bad tracks to be added to the Field defect list. This option may be repeated more than once if needed. The specification of bad tracks is in the pair absolute-cylinder/head-number.  If the user specified bad track is already in either the Vendor or Field defect lists, an obnoxious message will be printed and the user specification will be ignored. 

SEE ALSO

ipi(7)

BUGS

ifmt should support more than 2k sectors and different kinds of disks. 

September 02, 1992