Imaging SCSI hard disks

From: der Mouse <mouse_at_Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
Date: Wed Sep 1 22:30:45 2004

> In my case, the relevant command would resemble something like...

> ATTACH RQ0: /dev/sda

> (where 'sd' is the driver, and 'a' is the controller).

> This works with any and all emulators since to UNIX, unlike Windows,
> everything is a file. "Devices" are not special entities to
> open()/close() calls, etc.

Well, devices _are_ often special in various ways. Most notably here,
disk devices normally do not support accesses that are not a multiple
of the sector size, aligned on sector boundaries. (Since most
emulators don't try to do anything else with disks, they probably will
work fine. This is partly just general misimpression correcting, but
also partly because you may run into trouble if you try to use
something like a CD - the CD blocksize is fundamentally 2352, which
turns into 2K for a data CD (the other 304 bytes going for ECC and
suchlike), and many CD drives don't support sub-2K accesses, meaning
you may not be able to use a CD to back even a read-only disk.)

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Received on Wed Sep 01 2004 - 22:30:45 BST