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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!europa.clark.net!newsfeed2!news.easystreet.com!not-for-mail From: tedm@portsoft.com Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: bad block scan crashes -- help! Date: 17 Apr 1997 05:38:48 GMT Organization: Easystreet Online Services Lines: 45 Message-ID: <5j4d18$sjc$5@easystreet03> References: <3351E4DD.41C6@gambier.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca> <5iu6pm$26m@uriah.heep.sax.de> Reply-To: tedm@portsoft.com NNTP-Posting-Host: mail.portsoft.com X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.2.5 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:39189 In <5iu6pm$26m@uriah.heep.sax.de>, j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) writes: >Kyle Schalm <b9g1@gambier.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca> wrote: > >> during installation of 2.2.1, i select the entire drive (IDE) for >> FreeBSD use (with no compatibility option) and then select >> "B" - bad block scan option. after it does the scan, it crashes, >> printing out "signal 10 caught - that's bad!" and beeping > >That's bad -- but why do you do a bad block scan on an IDE disk at >all? If the disk has bad blocks, it's faulty, and you should better >replace it. > >The bad144 facility is poorly maintained these days, and should >probably be taken with a grain of salt. It's a ``for experts only'' >item, since only experts probably still have the ESDI drive where this >option was really required. > Now, be nice - I still have a few of those drives in service, two of them are on a FreeBSD 2.2.1 machine! Anyway, bad144 only works if the total number of tracks is reachable via BIOS, ie they must be under 1024 or some translation of. Large ESDI drives often exceed this with impunity, (large being 300MB, of course) but their controller BIOS'es would translate it down so you could still use bad144. bad144 is activated BEFORE the wd disk driver sends the controller commands to determine the number of sectors, etc. so it must operate on the bios-returned number of tracks. (which is going to be 1024 or under) The proper course of action with an IDE drive with bad sectors is to obtain the appropriate so-called "low-level" formatting utility from the drive manufacturer. This utility when run should scan the disk and reset the defect map in the IDE controller electronics to lock out the bad sectors. It's unfortunately not uncommon for incompatabilities to exist between various IDE drives and various "ide controller" chips. For example, recently someone gave me an IDE disk that had some bad sectors on it that they couldn't use. I put it in one machine, attempted to scan it and such and was unable to get the defect map to reset itself. I then put it into a different machine and repeated the process and the drive updated it's defects and the bad sectors magically disappeared. With new IDE disk sized reaching many gigabytes it is going to be more and more common to see this kind of thing again.