From: Kurt Siegl (siegl@risc.uni-linz.ac.at)
Date: 01/27/93


From: siegl@risc.uni-linz.ac.at (Kurt Siegl)
Subject: Re: Bad blocks (?) on hard disk
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 09:06:15 GMT

In article <C1HAqs.Lyv@world.std.com>, tgc@world.std.com (Terry Carlin) writes:
> rob@dinner.asrc.albany.edu (Robert D. Seals) writes:
> : Things seems sensible except that bad blocks on the hard disks

> One should: mkfs -c /dev/whatever howbig

This doesn't solve all problems. There are also additional problems
which should be solved somehow in future releases:

If your HD is not that bad mkfs will not mark all bad blocks imediately. There
is no -c option in fsck (efsck has already has this option) and therefore no way to
correct it afterwards.

In case of a bad block on the beginning of the HD you can't generate a swap file,
because while creating that file Linux starts reading from the beginning of the
disk physically and stops as soon it gets a bad block with infinite HD errors.
Because of that problem I can only generate a 2.5MB swap file on my system :-(

Kurt