*BSD News Article 77909


Return to BSD News archive

Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!serv.hinet.net!news.uoregon.edu!enews.sgi.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!surfnet.nl!sun4nl!Utrecht.NL.net!news.iaf.nl!news.es.iaf.nl!yedi!wilko
From: wilko@yedi.iaf.nl (Wilko Bulte)
Subject: Re: FreeBSD and ancient RLL drives with bad spots
Organization: Private FreeBSD site - Arnhem, The Netherlands 
Message-ID: <DxFC80.3nI@yedi.iaf.nl>
References: <19960902213332.richw@yank.kitchener.on.ca> <50luon$php@uriah.heep.sax.de>
Date: Sun, 8 Sep 1996 17:21:36 GMT
Lines: 24

j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) writes:

>richw@yank.kitchener.on.ca (Rich Wales) wrote:

>> 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.

>bad144 is not a matter of the drive, but a matter of the driver.  The
>`wd' driver does support it, but there used to be a lot of problem
>reports back in the old days when people was still actively using
>MFM/RLL/ESDI drives.

>Give it a try.

Whatever you do: make sure the low-level formatting on the
drive is done without spare sectoring enabled. Most cards report
eg 35 sec/tr although they already reserved 1 of the 35 sectors
for the spare sector. 

I've made a couple of ESDI cards to work in this way.

YMMV...

Wilko