4kb per sector virtual disk on vmware workstation

[d2alphame]

Is there anyone who has experience with vmware workstation? Is there any possible chance of creating a 4kb per sector (advanced format) virtual hard disk drive in vmware workstation? If there's no way of doing that then is there anyother emulator/virtual machine that can enable me create advanced format disks?

Thanks

[kscguru]

VMware doesn't implement 4K sectors. Don't know about other VMs.

[Kevin]

qemu does, however it requires that you use the most verbose variant of the command line options:

Code: Select all

qemu -drive file=test.img,if=none,id=my_disk \
     -device ide_drive,drive=my_disk,physical_block_size=4096

The analogous thing works for virtio-blk or SCSI disks.

[d2alphame]

Thanks Kevin. I'll note that

[Antti]

I will have to check Qemu. If using BIOS services INT 13h/AH=02h, or INT 13h/AH=42h to read sectors, will those use the 4096-byte sector size? My boot loader supports other sector sizes than 512 but I have not been able to test it yet. Probably I made unnecessary work because the sector size seems always be 512 bytes (except "non-emulation" CD but the loader is different anyway). I am even considering to remove the sector-size independency because it would make it much more simpler. However, it seems that nobody supports it so at least I would have one "unique feature".

[Prochamber]

I will have to check Qemu. If using BIOS services INT 13h/AH=02h, or INT 13h/AH=42h to read sectors, will those use the 4096-byte sector size? My boot loader supports other sector sizes than 512 but I have not been able to test it yet. Probably I made unnecessary work because the sector size seems always be 512 bytes (except "non-emulation" CD but the loader is different anyway). I am even considering to remove the sector-size independency because it would make it much more simpler. However, it seems that nobody supports it so at least I would have one "unique feature".

The OP might be planning to support solid state drives, they use an internal sector size of 4kb so it would seem likely that there's support in major operating systems.

[Kevin]

Hmm, was the question about physical or logical block size? qemu does have options for the logical one as well, though it is ignored for IDE. So if you want to use that, you'll need to use virtio-blk or SCSI.

Also, as far as I know, BIOSes don't support 4k logical block size. That is, no 4k sector boot disks for you, at least with the default firmware.

[d2alphame]

Hmm, was the question about physical or logical block size? qemu does have options for the logical one as well, though it is ignored for IDE. So if you want to use that, you'll need to use virtio-blk or SCSI.

Also, as far as I know, BIOSes don't support 4k logical block size. That is, no 4k sector boot disks for you, at least with the default firmware.

Does that mean that even the interrupt 13h extensions i.e. 42h (extended read sectors) and 43h (extended write sectors) won't work for 4kb per sector?