a question about "sector size 4096"

Young_zhang · 11-28-2011, 01:47 AM

hello everyone.I meet a problem:
my os is centos5.5.I have a new mobile harddisk.I use "fdisk" to create partition.It success.But when I use "w" comand to write information to my disk. It prompt "unable to write to /dev/sda".But when I create partition under WinXp,It successed.As I known,This disk's sector size is 4096.How can solve this problem?
Thank you.

corp769 · 11-28-2011, 01:53 AM

Saying that you have a new "mobile" hard drive, is it the primary drive that you are working off of? I ask because since the error is relating to sda, normally sda is the primary drive being used, and it would make sense, since it is most likely being using. After plugging in your hard drive, could you run the following and post the results for me, using code tags? Thanks!

Code:

ls -al /dev/sd*

Cheers,

Josh

Young_zhang · 11-28-2011, 01:58 AM

no,it isn't the primary drive.the primary drive is /dev/hda.it is a move hard disk.

corp769 · 11-28-2011, 01:59 AM

Ok. Is your hard drive mounted? If so, nothing will be able to be written to it.

Young_zhang · 11-28-2011, 02:03 AM

the partition is not mounted.
I know this question is because of "sector size".this disk's sector size is 4096 as normal is 512.but i don't know how to solve it.

corp769 · 11-28-2011, 02:05 AM

Ahh ok. Have a look here then - http://karelzak.blogspot.com/2010/05...rd-drives.html

Young_zhang · 11-28-2011, 02:29 AM

sorry,i can not open the site.
thank you,corp769

corp769 · 11-28-2011, 03:03 AM

Ok. In that case, what is fdisk reporting? I mean, is it reporting that it is indeed a 4096 byte sector, or a 512?

Young_zhang · 11-28-2011, 03:22 AM

yes,fdisk prompt "this disk sector size is 4096" when i run fdisk /dev/sda

corp769 · 11-28-2011, 03:28 AM

Can I ask what the current file system is on the hard drive? If it is NTFS, then you won't be able to do what you are doing, unless you fully format the hard drive first. Also, you are running fdisk as your normal user, or root?

Young_zhang · 11-28-2011, 05:38 AM

user is root.the partition is just allocated.there is no file system applied.