QNX API to get hard disk sector information

QNX DEVELOPERS General Programming
1

Hi,
I need the information about hard disk sector number,

Suppose the hard disk configuration is

Config: 255 Heads, 63 Sectors/track, 10011 Cylinders, 512 Block Size

Total Number of sectors = 255 * 63 * 10011 = 160826715 sectors

When I executed fdisk command, I received information in terms of number of blocks

 _____OS_____     Start      End     ______Number_____    Size    Boot
 name    type    Cylinder  Cylinder  Cylinders  Blocks
  1. FAT32 ( 12) 0 500 501 8048502 3929 MB
  2. QNZ ( 79) 3824 10010 6187 99394155 48532 MB *
  3. FAT32 ( 11) 501 3823 3323 53383995 26066 MB
  4. ______ (___) _______ _______ _______ _________ _____

Total Number of blocks = 8048502 + 99394155 + 53383995 = 160826652 blocks

There is a difference of 63 between Total Number of sectors and Total Number of block.

Could you please clarify the reason of this difference.

Also is there any API in QNX to get the number of heads, sectors/track and cylinders so as to calculate the number of sectors from my C++ application?

Thanks,
Hello

2

There is a difference of 63 between Total Number of sectors and Total Number of block.
The first 63 sectors are reserved for partition table, etc.

3

The values of sector/track/cylinder are an ancient remnant from when the controller had to know these values. All modern drives are LBA (Logical Block Addressing) simply numbered 0…N.
The H/T/C numbers that EIDE drives display are artificial and usually have no relation to the actual internal H/T/C numbers. In the case of a solid state drive or CF card, they are of course completely artificial as there are no heads, tracks or cylinders. In some cases the BIOS still needs to know these numbers.

I mention this because I haven’t seen any access to these numbers in QNX 6. There might be an API the will provide them, but as I’ve tried to say they are unnecessary.

On the other hand, you can open your device:

fd = open("/dev/hd0", O_RDONLY);

and then use stat(fd, …). If you poke around in the stat structure you will find the number you seek.

4

I need to write/read data in blocks to a particular sector of hard disk.

readblock() and writeblock() API requires start block number and number of blocks to write/read as arguments.

From system configuration 255 Heads, 63 Sectors/track, 10011 Cylinders,

Total number of sectors = 255 * 10011 * 63 = 160826715

Executing fdisk on /dev/hd0 , Total blocks = 160826652(Added all partition blocks together)
Executing fstat on /dev/hd0, Total blocks = 160836480

What is the reason of the above difference?
Also there is a confusion regarding sector number and block number. Are they same or different ?

Thanks,
hello

5

As machoen pointed out, multiplying cylindersheadssectors (CHS) is not accurate for modern drives. The drive typcically contains MORE sectors than this computation.

Executing fstat on /dev/hd0, Total blocks = 160836480
This number is obtained by “asking” the drive interface for the number of LBAs (sectors) it supports. Part of the ATAPI spec.

160826652(Added all partition blocks together)
This is the result of CHS-63… (1001125563 - 63) The remaining sectors (9828) are “round-off” and can’t be put in the partition table - hence they are essentially unusable.

sector number and block number. Are they same or different ?
In traditional unix, “block” was 1K while “sector” was 512b. However in QNX, a block is 512b - so block is the same as sector.

The concept of “block” being an integral number of sectors is analogous to “cluster” in the MS world.

6

Thank you denkelly and maschoen.