*BSD News Article 5556


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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!spool.mu.edu!agate!soda.berkeley.edu!wjolitz
From: wjolitz@soda.berkeley.edu (William F. Jolitz)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: bad sector table corrupt
Date: 24 Sep 1992 16:27:55 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley, CS Undergraduate Association
Lines: 31
Message-ID: <19sqabINNfh7@agate.berkeley.edu>
References: <1992Sep23.174324.16625@Urmel.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE>
NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.berkeley.edu


In article <1992Sep23.174324.16625@Urmel.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE> kuku@acds.physik.rwth-aachen.de writes:
>
>..
>The system got hung. After resetting and rebooting I was left
>in single user mode with a failed fsck on wd1c (I was using wd1c as a /u filesystem). 
>

This is your problem. The end of the c partition is reserved for the bad block
sector table...

> ...
>Given that a sector in the range of the last sectors of the disk  was 
>accessed during the rcp...

....And wiped it out.

There are two magic partitions -- "d" which is always untranslated, and
"c" which is translated but special in that it covers all of the 386BSD
related portion of the drive (e.g. if running in a DOS partition, the entire
partition related to 386BSD). This includes the bad sector table at the
end if you are using bad sector forwarding (the "sf" field).

If you want to make a full-sized 386BSD partition, you want something which
includes all but the bad sector forwarding table (a partition "a" or "e")
that avoids the area at the end of the bad sector table. The newfs program
is ignorant of special characteristics of the "c" partition bad block structure.

MORAL: Do not use "c" or "d", unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing.

Lynne.