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4kb per sector virtual disk on vmware workstation
Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2013 9:37 am
by 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
Re: 4kb per sector virtual disk on vmware workstation
Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2013 10:53 am
by kscguru
VMware doesn't implement 4K sectors. Don't know about other VMs.
Re: 4kb per sector virtual disk on vmware workstation
Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2013 3:37 pm
by 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.
Re: 4kb per sector virtual disk on vmware workstation
Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2013 4:09 pm
by d2alphame
Thanks Kevin. I'll note that
Re: 4kb per sector virtual disk on vmware workstation
Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2013 10:16 pm
by 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".
Re: 4kb per sector virtual disk on vmware workstation
Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2013 3:04 am
by Prochamber
Antti wrote: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.
Re: 4kb per sector virtual disk on vmware workstation
Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2013 3:15 am
by 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.
Re: 4kb per sector virtual disk on vmware workstation
Posted: Thu Aug 15, 2013 6:55 am
by d2alphame
Kevin wrote: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?