*BSD News Article 8495


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From: bachesta@pugsley.Data-IO.COM (Jim Bachesta)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: [BSD386] wd.c and badblocks with the WD1007V
Message-ID: <1992Dec2.143347.21974@data-io.com>
Date: 2 Dec 92 14:33:47 GMT
References: <148@snidely.UUCP>
Sender: bachesta@pugsley (Jim Bachesta)
Organization: Data I/O Corporation
Lines: 16

I have a WREN V 380 Meg Drive with a WD1007 Controller. I had similar problem. What
happened was if I let the controller find the bad sectors it would mark the entire
track as bad. When BSD saw this it would allocate all the sectors on that track via
bad144. It didn't take long for all space (126 sectors) to be consumed.

The work around was to just format the drive with out defining the
bad sectors. I than let the system find any bad sectors. Unfortunately it 
finds bad sectors on reading, not writing. There is the potential of losing
valuable data. A better solution would be to scan the entire drive under UNIX before
I start using it for normal use. Does anyone have a scan program that will read
all available sectors on a drive? I hope this helps.


Jim Bachesta
Data I/O Corporation
bachesta@Data-IO.COM