sectorsize v1.1 a tool to detect the physical and logical sector size of Hard disk (Advanced Format supported)

[Micky1979 2,776]

sectorsize is a tiny command line I made to detect the Physical and logical sector size of your hard disk.

 

usage:

 

sudo sectorsize /dev/diskX

 

output on a AF (Advanced Formatted ) drive:

Physical sector size: 4096
Logical sector size: 512

output on non AF  drive:

Physical sector size: 512
Logical sector size: 512

OSX seem to show always 512-byte as "logical" sector size (*because is a standard?), but you can see that AF drive show a physical 4096-bytes sector, and probably this mean that this drive use the 512e tecnology (512 bytes emulation).

*NOTE: hard disk with 4K use firmware to emulate 512 sector size....as the OS wants..

 

This will be useful to see if your hard disk uses the Advanced Format technology or not.

 

Why?

Installing Chamelon (or Clover) currently can create the boot0 error on AF drives with physical 4096-bytes (or 4K).

This will be useful to understand what to do  before installing the bootloader on these drives.

A test will be performed by changing Chameleon installer to do all automatically.

stay tuned

 

Thanks to verdant for the tests made

 

Micky

sectorsize_v1.1_binary.zip

sectorsize_v1.1_source.zip

sectorsize_v1.2_scripting_easy.zip

[blackosx 1,202]

Nice little tool micky1979

So maybe that DKIOCGETPHYSICALBLOCKSIZE is used to populate the 'Physical Block Size' value in Device Characteristics in ioreg?

ioreg -lw0 | grep "Device Characteristics"

[Micky1979 2,776]

First I never look at this before  , but I think Yes, surely the ioreg is populated by sys/disk.h for extra details.

Diskarbitration framenwork (as I am using in Pandora show only Logical size or  I have to do something special that I did not understand), now I have more code to work on!

and DKIOCGETPHYSICALBLOCKSIZE seems a more direct and precise method, with just two lines of code and a clean output   ...(and the code can be use in a Cocoa app too)

EDIT

this because I want to use that in a bash script (or send this as argument from the app to the Chamelon/Clover scripts??), and I made variant of that command that exit in this way:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

USAGE:

sudo sectorsize /dev/diskX

 

This build is customized to be easily used with the bash/sh scripts ad return

the following output:

 

Physical XXX (if the Physical value is aqcuired..)

 

Logical XXX  (if the Physical value was not aquired for some reasons)

 

Standard 512 (if no Logical and nor Physical value was aquired for some reasons)

 

XXX can be 512 or 4096 (or any other aquired) as output in bytes.

 

sectorsize exit 0 on success for the cases above. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

and use the result as argument for bs=n using dd.... only a test  to see if everything is ok. In the meantime, I gave an eye to an hard drive from an old laptop  I had(2 year), and surprisingly is a WD 512GB with 4K secotrs

[blackosx 1,202]

I currently read the Device Characteristics from ioreg for DarwinDumper, but maybe I'll add your tool for next revision? Would that be okay?

[Micky1979 2,776]

Sure, the source is included!

I'm going to add a customized version for scripting to the first post..

[blackosx 1,202]

Great. Thanks.

Not sure when I'll update DarwinDumper but I'll get round to it at some point.

[Micky1979 2,776]

Added v1.2 with different output

[blackosx 1,202]

Great. Thanks.

 

EDIT:

One benefit of reading the property from ioreg is you don't need root privileges, where as accessing the disk directly does require root privileges. Of course, this won’t be a problem with the Chameleon installer or DarwinDumper as root privileges will have already been granted for those particular actions.

[Micky1979 2,776]

Great. Thanks.

 

EDIT:

One benefit of reading the property from ioreg is you don't need root privileges, where as accessing the disk directly does require root privileges. Of course, this won’t be a problem with the Chameleon installer or DarwinDumper as root privileges will have already been granted for those particular actions.

Reading now your EDIT.

Yep require Root privileges, otherwise can't be used.....but now I can something like that easily (see at the red arrow):

 

I just finished editing Chamelon and Clover scripts to acquire the real sectors  size, and tomorrow I'll do a test on the drives that you see in the picture.

 

Fingers crossed  ! 

[Micky1979 2,776]

The first test:

Pandora's BOX post-install log




InsanelyMac 11/24/14-21:28
--
-- Zeus post-installation Session started --
-- Running from OSx 10.10.1
--------------------------------------------------------------------
** Enoch **
--------------------------------------------------------------------
===============================================
Main Standard Post-Install Script
Darwin/x86 boot v5.0.132 - Enoch (PANDORA) r2472
*********************************
-----------------------------------------------

Check if target folders exist:
/Volumes/Lion/usr/local/bin folders exist
/Volumes/Lion/usr/standalone/i386 folders exist

Clean up old installations files..
Cleaning done

Installing new boot files:
all the boot files have been copied successfully
Running Standard postinstall script
Target volume = /Volumes/Lion on /dev/disk1s2
Target disk already has existing Chameleon stage 0 loader - boot0md (boot0workV2).
Detected a Windows installation on this volume.
===============================================
CheckFatType: Do we have FAT16 or FAT32?
****************************************
Written boot0md to /dev/disk1.
Physical 4096bytes sector size detected for /dev/rdisk1s2
0+1 records in
0+1 records out
1024 bytes (1,0 kB) copied, 0,000288 s, 3,6 MB/s
Written boot1h to /dev/rdisk1s2.
Written boot to /Volumes/Lion on /dev/disk1s2.
Preparing to check target disk for previous installations.
Checking disk1.
Nothing found that could cause any problems.

Windows is installed so that can remain the active partition

/Volumes/Lion already has an Extra folder

Standard script complete

===============================================
END - Standard Post-Install Script
********************************* 

"Physical 4096bytes sector size detected for /dev/rdisk1s2"

 

Booted and Writing from that hard disk with 4K sector  EDIT, w/o umonting the Volume..

...need to do a build...soon

[Onixs 64]

Without unmounting? This is great! Thanks Mickey1979

[Micky1979 2,776]

Obviously this will require tests .. hoping that this does not happen only to me, ha ha ha.

However, there can be two types of 4k drives, and both seem to have different alignments with OSes based on their firmware and the bus where they are connected apparently (yes, this makes difference)..

[stevsaunders 0]

On 11/25/2014 at 8:53 PM, Micky1979 said:

Obviously this will require tests .. hoping that this does not happen only to me, ha ha ha.

However, there can be two types of 4k drives, and both seem to have different alignments with OSes based on their firmware and the bus where they are connected apparently (yes, this makes difference)..

 

As long as you align your partitions on a multiple of 4KB, you're fine. You don't otherwise have to do anything special for drives with 4KB physical sectors.

essay typer