Re: Re[2]: AW: DOC vs. IDE

[Richard A. Smith]

On Thu, 24 Oct 2002 21:27:21 +0100, Ian Molton wrote:
> > The SanDisk guy told me I sould be able to recover sector 0 by
> > writing all zeros to it which will reset the crc but I haven't been
> > able to find an application that is 1) Freeware and 2) Will do raw
> > sector writes.
>
> 'dd' ?

dd would work if the device was present. But you can't dd to a device
you don't have.  When the IDE code attempts to read the partition
table of the disk it chokes and never inserts the device into the
device tree.  I guess that probally should be considered a bug in the
IDE code but some might call it a feature.

Note all this info is from 2.2.x..  Stand by.. Yep just checked with
2.4.18 and its still the same. Well almost,  it actually does have
the device in the device tree but on any access to the device it
attempts to read the partition table and thus gets an IO error and
fails.

Suposedly there are some IDE low level raw access IOCTLS that can
send commands directly to the IDE controller but I've not
investigated it yet.