From: dkyoon@alnitak.usc.edu (Dae-Kyun Yoon) Subject: Bad blocks in swap partition (was: Re: Bad blocks (?) on hard disk) Date: 29 Jan 1993 17:53:14 -0800
Dear Linuxers,
I posted an article about the problem with X386.S3 and swapping a while
ago. My problem was if I use a certain amount of swap space while running
X, and exit from X , then the system locked up.
A few people replied to my posting and they all suspected the swapping in
the first place rather than X386.S3. This reminded me of some bad blocks
which I noticed while doing "mkswap -c". However, I didn't think this
would be any problem because those bad blocks would not be used, anyway.
(I could notice that the actual swap size decreased by a certain amount,
and I thought that's because those bad blocks are marked not to be used)
However, as I mentioned in my previous posting, those weired problem *did*
occur, I, therefore, moved my swap partition to cleaner area. After moving the
swap partition, I had no problems at all.
So, my questions are:
1) How does the linux file system handle bad blocks ?
2) Is swap partition more prone to create bad blocks than other regular
minix file system ?
I would appreciate any comments on this subject. -- DK