*BSD News Article 17296


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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!gatech!nntp.msstate.edu!cy.cs.olemiss.edu!viren
From: viren@cy.cs.olemiss.edu (Viren R. Shah)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Problems installing 386bsd -- bad superblocks
Date: 18 Jun 1993 18:11:00 GMT
Organization: University of Mississippi, Dept. of Computer Science
Lines: 39
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <1vt0fk$oj0@Tut.MsState.Edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: cy.cs.olemiss.edu

We are having trouble with bad blocks (and bad superblocks) on our IDE drive
when using 386bsd and trying to ftp the etcdist and srcdist to our machine. 

This is the situation: 
	Machine specs:
		i386 25Mhz with 4Mb RAM
		Seagate ST3283A AT Interface Drive with 245MB
		Drive controller : PTI-227B Super I/O card

We have been able to get the base system installed, our system
is configured such that the root partition has 60MB, the swap
partition has 32 MB and the usr partition 150MB.  At this point, we
began to ftp the bindist to our machine and then we extracted the
bindist. This all seemed to go fine.  However, when we attempted to
ftp the next set of files, in etcdist, our connection broke and 
the end result was we ended up with bad blocks.  

We naively tried several different solutions, as follows:
 
1) We tried to use fsck and it told us which blocks were bad (4 consecutive in
the root partition) and that it could not find alternate superblocks,
to specify our own.

2) Then we tried to use /sbin/badsect to mark out the bad sectors, but it kept
saying "Device is Busy"

3) We attempted to use Bad144 and got these 2 messages: "Can not read bad block
info" and "Can not write disk label to enable bad sector handling by the drive"

4) Lastly, we tried to mount /dev/wd0h to use newfs, but it told us we had a 
bogus superblock

We are hoping someone can help us eliminate the bad blocks.
Please direct all replies to 
		ajm@sam.cs.olemiss.edu.

Once again, thanks.

A. Mull