*BSD News Article 62889


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From: dwatson@stout.entertain.com (Darryl Watson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: SCSI drive settings question
Date: 7 Mar 1996 11:30:34 -0700
Organization: ABWAM, Inc., full service ISP, voice: 1+ 303 730-6050
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Message-ID: <4hna0a$19q@stout.entertain.com>
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I've got an Adaptec 174x SCSI controller and BSDi 2.0 with patches.

I have a problem with my system in that it is crashing every 5 days or 
less.  The crashes have had the 'trap with null curproc' message until 
today, when I removed the entries in the kernel and fstab for the swap 
partition on my system disk.  This morning, the system crashed with 
something like a 'page fault dump' message (it went by too fast for me to 
catch).  This leads me to believe that there is a bad sector on the swap
partition of the system disk, and leads to this question:

What effect does enabling the 'parity check' function on SCSI drives?  
Can the drive or disk subsystem automagically map out bad sectors if 
parity is enabled?  Or is it a situation where if there is a write error, 
enabling parity checks will cause the system to panic more often?

Any information in this regard is appreciated!