*BSD News Article 7861


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!umn.edu!news.cs.indiana.edu!mikes@moose.cs.indiana.edu
From: "Michael Squires" <mikes@moose.cs.indiana.edu>
Subject: [386BSD] Checking disk for bad blocks
Message-ID: <1992Nov17.235026.1564@news.cs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 23:50:17 -0500
Lines: 19

I'm trying to use an older drive with a fair number of bad sectors on it,
a Miniscribe 660MB ESDI drive.  Running Spinrite under DOS I can lock out
all of the bad/questionable sectors.  I've also been able to write a
disktab entry which is accepted by disklabel/newfs.  Is there some standard
method of writing data to a partition block by block and then reading it
back to look for the really awful problems?  The Adaptec drivers will
output the block number when there is a disk error, but the WD drivers
on the dist.fs disk will only indicate that there is an error.

I can use the information from Spinrite to input to bad144, but that will
lose 140MB as DOS can't handle the real drive parameters (over 1024 cylinders).

Doing something like "cat /dev/wd0a > /dev/null" does not seem to find the
problem blocks, although they show up quickly when trying to extract files.

-- 

Mike Squires (mikes@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu)     812 855 3974 (w) 812 333 6564 (h)
mikes@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu          546 N Park Ridge Rd., Bloomington, IN 47408