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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!vic.news.telstra.net!act.news.telstra.net!psgrain!iafrica.com!uct.ac.za!und.ac.za!peacenjoy.mikom.csir.co.za!news.uoregon.edu!enews.sgi.com!news.mathworks.com!news.kei.com!hookup!news.nstn.ca!bignews.cycor.ca!opentext.com!yank.kitchener.on.ca!not-for-mail From: richw@yank.kitchener.on.ca (Rich Wales) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: FreeBSD and ancient RLL drives with bad spots Date: 2 Sep 1996 17:50:42 -0400 Organization: Opinions expressed in this posting are mine alone Lines: 25 Sender: richw@dialup1.opentext.com Message-ID: <19960902213332.richw@yank.kitchener.on.ca> NNTP-Posting-Host: opengate.opentext.com I'm trying to take an "old clunker" (386DX/33) system and give it a new lease on life by installing FreeBSD on it. The system has two Seagate ST-277R (65MB RLL) hard drives. I'm also going to put in a couple of not-quite-so-old drives I have lying around, using an IDE interface configured as a secondary. I'm concerned, though, about the bad spots on the old RLL drives. One of the two drives appears to be error-free, but the other one has 15 or 20 bad tracks. With DOS, this wasn't too much of a problem, but will FreeBSD be able to deal satisfactorily with bad spots? These drives do =not= implement the BAD144 sector-remapping protocol, as far as I'm aware, so I can't hide the problem that way. The best I can do is run a low-level format, then do a media analysis and lock out the bad tracks. I tried installing FreeBSD with the drive with the bad spots as my root, but "newfs" croaked after trying (unsuccessfully) to put backup super- block info in one of the bad spots. I got around that problem by using the clean drive as root, but I'd still like to use the other drive and am open to suggestions. Rich Wales <richw@yank.kitchener.on.ca> http://yank.kitchener.on.ca/~richw/