USB Ram Stick

[Julian H. Stacey]

Hi Oliver, cc list.
Thanks for your response :-)

Oliver Fromme wrote:
> Julian Stacey <jhs at berklix.org> wrote:
>  >   On FreeBSD-6.0-RELEASE I took a friend's 2G stick containing the
>  >   usual MBR with one partition allocated as aprox.  2 Gig of DOS
>  >   file system, & read the entire raw stick onto hard disc.
>  > 
>  >   (I still have that image BTW, 2138177536 Apr  3 01:40 sony-stick-da0 ,
>  >    but I dont care about the data, I care about the expensive stick!)
>  >   
>  >   I wrote the image back to my identical stick (with dd), it wouldn't continue
>  >   writing after a while, (cant remember exact message).
> 
> The exact message would be very useful to know.

Lost, I was travelling at the time; either I saved it & then lost
it after travel, or it was unsaved as boringly common, eg as in a
message I just got:
	dd: /dev/da0: Input/output error
	1000448+0 records in 1000448+0 records out
	512229376 bytes transferred in 809.536057 secs (632744 bytes/sec)
(while sizing a 1 Gig stick, & it failing half way).
   ( My laptop, or FreeBSD, doesnt seem to always get on with the
   Belkin Cardbus USB 2.0 adapter - the Belkin adapter runs too hot
   to hold & BSD sometimes crashes (& my brother's Belkin died
   shortly after use in my laptop,
   http://berklix.com/~jhs/hardware/toshiba/satellite.s5100-603/
   whereas his Belkin USB had until then run fine in his near
   identical Toshiba that runs just MS-XP (I suspect BSD is running
   the card in full power mode, whereas perhaps MS-XP is doing
   standby cycles or similar) )

... However the Belkin is a side issue, I'm using my USB-1 built in ports
on various other machines to analyse this 2G bad stick.

> Are you absolutely sure that your stick is really identical,
> including the size?  

4 x 2G sticks were bought at same time from same vendor, so nominaly
the same size, however in light of your writing below, No, your
most probably right, the sticks would likely have been of slightly
different sizes (but I can't check as I now only have access to
mine, the other 3 are with MS users 1000 kilometres away,
who don't have much clue or eg dd to measure bytes).

> The sizes sometimes seem to differ by
> small amounts, even between sticks of the exact same brand
> and model.
> 
> For example, a shop here recently sold 1GB sticks for 25 EUR
> so a friend of mine bought two of them.  I tried them both:
> one had 2096640 blocks, the other had 2096768 blocks.
> 
> I'm not an expert, but my guess is that the manufacturer
> tests the chips and excludes bad areas, so the capacities
> vary.
> 
> Maybe your image was a little too big for the second stick.

Yes, thanks, good point, seems a ~ 50% chance.
I've sized several sticks of mine now you mention this, & they all
come up short of nominal capacity.  (I'd wrongly expected a more
conservative architecture, with extra blocks to be patched in as
needed to retain nominal capacity).

>  >   Now /dev/da0* is just da0 , no other entries.
>  >   
>  >   I've tried creating a new MBR with fdisk, but failed.
> 
> Did you try to clean it before?  i.e.
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 count=100
> (See the example in the bsdlabel(8) manpage.)

Yes, pretty sure I did, but did it again:
	dd: /dev/da0: Input/output error
	1+0 records in 0+0 records out 0 bytes transferred 
same for dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 count=1
same for dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/pass0 count=100

>  >   camcontrol format da0 -w
>  >     You are about to REMOVE ALL DATA from the following device:
>  >     pass0: <USB USB 2.0 Fash 1.00> Removable Direct Access SCSI-2 device 
>  >     pass0: Serial Number 
>  >     pass0: 1.000MB/s transfers 
>  >     Are you SURE you want to do this? (yes/no) 
>  >     Formatting...Format Complete
> 
> I assume that didn't do anything at all.

Yes, it didn't help.

bsdlabel -w da0
	bsdlabel: /dev/da0 read: Input/output error

The only hope now before I give up & try to get the stick replaced,
is if anyone might know how I could use manipulate this

  camcontrol  modepage da0   -l  
    0x00    Vendor-Specific
  
  camcontrol modepage da0 -m 0x00 -b
    bf 01 f8 43 07 28 80 c0
    07 28 00 00 00 00 34 e0
    bf bf 19 ba 05 28 eb 8b
    04 08 5c 9b ab 07 00 b3
    07 28 01 00 00 00 80 c0
    07 28 00 b3 07 28 54 e0
    bf 01 f8 43 07 28 01 00
    00 00 98 86 04 08 b4 e0
    bf bf 51 b8 05 28 eb 8b
    04 08 5c 9b ab 07 10 30
    07 28 88 e0 bf bf 01 00
    00 00 8c e0 bf bf 84 e0
    bf bf 19 ba 05 28 7f 8c
    04 08 00 b0 07 28 00 b1
    07 28 00 b2 07 28 00 b3
    07 28 00 b1 07 28 00 b1
    07 01 6e b7 05 28 00 b3
    07 28 3c cb 09 28 04 e1
    bf 01 00 b3 07 28 60 e0
    bf bf 04 00 00 00 04 00
    00 00 d8 e0 bf bf 01 00
    00 00 dc e0 bf bf 00 10
    00 01 f8 43 07 28 01 00
    00 00 98 86 04 08 f4 e0
    bf bf 26 9a 05 28 eb 8b
    04 08 5c 9b ab 07 00 b0
    07 28 e4 e0 bf bf 01 00
    00 00 b4 1b 08 28 14 e1

Or, might /dev/pass0 be of some use ? Any other ideas anyone ?
Thanks.

-- 
Julian Stacey.  Consultant Unix Net & Sys. Eng., Munich.  http://berklix.com
Mail in Ascii, HTML=spam.     Ihr Rauch = mein allergischer Kopfschmerz.