dd failure odd sectors, block addressing of 1024 question

From: farmer dude <[email protected]>

[Linux cannot read the last (odd) sector of a disk or partition]

1.5 Suggested dd problem workarounds
If you see dd miss that last sector use another tool to either capture the last sector or print the contents in hex and ASCII.
Use FreeBSD.

Yes, a well-known problem.

Earlier, it didnt matter too much - the loss of a single sector of storage is harmless, usual partitioning loses much more - but nowadays there are several applications that need access to the last sector of a disk, so this will have to be addressed.

And indeed, it has been addressed, and patches exist, and some of the relevant patches have been applied already. There is no reason to expect that this issue will not go away entirely before 2.6.

Andries