RE: SATA errors accessing hidden partitions

[Jorge Fernandez Monteagudo <jorgefm@cirsa.com>]

Hi Bryan! Thanks for your detailed answer!

>Notice that logical block 524272 on devices sda3, sda4, and sda5 are
>cited.  This is a blind guess, but are these partitions 524288 sectors
>(256 MB) in size?

No, they're 4GB partitions.


>You can notice that the first few reads are near the "end" of the
>partition.  In fact, the first two read completions are 128 sectors
>before the end, and 16 sectors before the end.  I'm guessing that this
>"-16" read is the one that's failing in these three partitions.

Then, there is an inconsistency in the blkid and kernel communication? Why the kernel
tries to access to a locked range? It seems that blkid ask for a sector and the kernel try
to read it back ignoring its locked, reducing speed and trying again with no luck until
the error is returned. This is consistent with our workaround removing blkid from the
udev rule to avoid the error.

Maybe the OPAL is not clear enough about locked ranges and kernel thinks is an error,
or it's an error in the disk's firmware I don't know, but under windows or MacOS X no
error is displayed.

Is there some way to ask a disk for their locked ranges and patch blkid to avoid accesing them?

Thanks,
Jorge