Unedited by Larry Chiang
#Grok3 just blew my mind.
I’m attempting to set up (partition and format) an old SCSI drive on a 1980s PDP-11/73 connected to an aftermarket Emulex UC17 controller rocking both a ZuluSCSI emulator AND a real ST43400N drive. Pretty obscure stuff.
The problem is banal – the drive has a current “temp” partition table created by the 211BSD UNIX kernel that’s seemingly random – or at least very wrong. The catch is you can’t shrink even an imaginary partition, so you can’t fix it, at least not easily.
Grok correctly figured out that the best way to fix it was to create an offline partition table in a file and then write it directly to the disk, without trying to read what was currently reported at all. By bypassing the current label and stuffing the current geometry onto the drive, you could fix it in a single step.
The entails creating the entire partition table with all the correct geometry (heads, cyls, interleave, etc) for an ancient Seagate ST43400N.
The first time I hit this problem, a few months back, I used ChatGPT. After an hour or so of back and forth, “we” solved it, but it was multiple steps involving custom distkab entries.
Since Grok 3 is new, I figured I’d give it a shot:
It coughed out the right answer, including the partition table template for me to use, the first time, first prompt.
I did give it the source code to the disklabel command, which appears to have helped a great deal.
Given there just isn’t that much 211BSD information out there on the web, I’m surprised and impressed!
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