From: kennu@mits.mdata.fi (Kenneth Falck) Subject: Re: Bad blocks (?) on hard disk Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 21:29:14 GMT
erc@unislc.uucp (Ed Carp) writes:
> Terry Carlin (tgc@world.std.com) wrote:
>
> : Well, my experiences tell me it works at least with the 1542
> : controller. I just got an old 20 meg SCSI drive which used to sit on
> : a Mac. I partitioned it and did the mkfs -c /dev/sda1 20000. Worked
> : well. It found and marked ~15 bad blocks. To test it out, I tar'ed
> : a 60 meg disk over to the 20 meg drive until it complained about
> : running out of space. I then did a dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/null and
> : it went without error. I guess I could really put it through a long
> : repeating test, but I probably won't put anything on it that would
> : be critical, 'cause the disk is ~5 years old and may bite the dust at
> : any sec.
>
> It used not to work, but Linus tells me that this was fixed around 0.98.5
> or so.
>
> I hope he's right... ;)
Well... I converted from extfs into the ext2fs (seems nice & fast, my
thanks to Remy), and during the "mke2fs -c /dev/hda2" Linux reported
some errors, but seemed to recover from them just in time for mke2fs
not to know anything about them.
The result was a corrupt filesystem (i.e. some blocks were located on
bad disk space), and eventually I had to run my ROM diagnostics software
to find out the corrupt cylinder numbers and use "mke2fs -l" to mark
the bad space by hand.
I have a traditional AT-MFM controller and a Seagate ST251-1 boiler,
and I had exactly the same experience when I converted from minixfs
into extfs some moons ago.
Basically I could try and debug the kernel, but I lack knowledge,
hardware, specifications and time... :-( (A bit difficult to re-install
the system each time I want to test mke2fs; the bad blocks are in the
middle of my hard disk...)
By the way, I got my system pretty jammed when I fingered an ext2fs
partition by hand and tried to mount it; ext2fs said "Panic:
ext2_read_inode can't read inode" or something like that. Not much,
except that the partition was in my /etc/fstab, so every attempt to
reboot resulted in a panic... Had to boot off a floppy. (I wonder
if ext2fs could just settle to umount the partition instead of
paniccing..)
Well, everything works fine now and I'm happy :-)
> --
> Ed Carp erc@apple.com, erc@saturn.upl.com 801/538-0177
>
> "It is your resistance to 'what is' that causes your suffering." -- Buddha
-- kennu@mits.mdata.fi