freebsd-ports/sysutils/sformat/pkg-descr
Alexander Leidinger 772906abd2 From the submitter:
Sun format is a util for formatting/partitioning/analysis/repairing of SCSI
disks. While formatting and partitioning currently is only usefule on big-
endian systems in order to create Sun disk labels, analysis and repairing
works on either endian and are very useful to remap defect blocks when
AWRE/ARRE fail for some reason. Tested on i386 and sparc64, respawned a
disk here.

Submitted by:	marius@alchemy.franken.de
2003-01-02 15:07:43 +00:00

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The main advantages to the Sun format utility are:
- Working surface analyze that will detect defective blocks that are going
to get bad.
- Analyzing program that detects defective bearings in the disk (-randrw).
- Will repair nearly any defective disk, that has no firmware bug or electric
defect.
- Allows to clear the grown defect list if a disk.
- Disk geometry and label geometry are separated.
- Allows cheating in the label geometry to deal with the problems with the
limitation to 16 bit data types in the Sun disk label.
- Large database of disks including firmware specials.
- You need no desk calculator to generate a partition table.
Shorthands for:
- MBytes
- cylinders/head/sectors
- size partition to end on end of disk
- partition following another partition
- partition ending before another partition
- shifting partition on the disk (allows growing part 0 and shrinking part 1)
- Partition consistency checker with (ascii) graphical display.
- Mode page interpreter allows to set easily all mode pages you will ever find
in a manual, sformat needs not to know about them.
NOTE: Sformat has its full functionality on SunOS/Solaris on sparc
and Motorola systems, on all other systems sformat will create
Sun disk labels with wrong byte-order, but formatting/analysis/
repair will work.