diskinfo(1M)

NAME

diskinfo — describe characteristics of a disk device

SYNOPSIS

/usr/sbin/diskinfo [-b|-v] character_devicefile

DESCRIPTION

The diskinfo command determines whether the character special file named by character_devicefile is associated with a SCSI or floppy disk drive. If so, diskinfo summarizes the disk's characteristics.

The diskinfo command displays information about the following characteristics of disk drives:

Vendor name: Manufacturer of the drive (SCSI only)
Product ID: Product identification number or ASCII name
Type: floppy or SCSI classification for the device
Disk: Size of disk specified in bytes
Sector: Specified as bytes per sector

Both the size of disk and bytes per sector represent formatted media.

Options

The diskinfo command recognizes the following options:

-b

Return the size of the disk in 1024-byte sectors.

-v

Display a verbose summary of all of the information available from the device. For floppy drives, this option has no effect.

SCSI disk devices return the following:

Vendor and product ID
Device type
Size (in bytes and in logical blocks)
Bytes per sector
Revision level
SCSI conformance level data

WARNINGS

As of release 10.20 of HP-UX, certain IDE devices, CD-ROMs in particular, will respond to diskinfo inquiries as if they were SCSI devices. Therefore, the text "SCSI describe" in the output of the diskinfo command does not definitively mean that the disk is in fact a SCSI drive (especially in the case of CD-ROMs). Use ioscan(1M), ioscan -fn, and check which type of INTERFACE node, SCSI or IDE, the device's hardware path lies beneath, in order to definitively determine a drive's interface.

DEPENDENCIES

General

The diskinfo command supports floppy and HP SCSI disk devices.

SCSI Devices

The SCSI specification provides for a wide variety of device-dependent formats. For non-HP devices, diskinfo may be unable to interpret all of the data returned by the device. Refer to the drive operating manual accompanying the unit for more information.

AUTHOR

diskinfo was developed by HP.