HDDRIVER/HDDRUTIL on the FireBee

[uweseimet]

A patient user (patient enough to wait 2 minutes after launching HDDRUTIL) found that there does not seem to be any fundamental problem with running HDDRUTIL on the FireBee.

The main (and maybe only) issue is that the FireBee's SCSI Driver does not implement the SCSI standard and/or the SCSI Driver interface correctly. In particular there are issues with handling errors. Therefore the same device is listed more than once (the LUN handling is broken, see screenshot), and a bus scan takes very long. This can be verified when running the SCSI Driver test suite, which reports numerous violations of the SCSI standard. The SCSI_MON tool can also be useful for analyzing this kind of errors.
The FireBee developers have been notified, but there was no reaction. Since the SCSI Driver test suite is open source and provides details on these errors and all relevant standards, fixing the FireBee's SCSI Driver should be possible based on the test results.

As soon as all issues have been fixed it might even be possible to run HDDRIVER and not only HDDRUTIL on the FireBee. HDDRUTIL offers full functionality on any system (even without HDDRIVER) with SCSI Driver and XHDI support. Getting HDDRUTIL running properly may be interesting not just for users who would like to partition media on their FIreBee, but also because of other features.