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From: "Serge A. Babkin" <babkin@hq.icb.chel.su>
Message-Id: <199507040747.MAA02780@hq.icb.chel.su>
Subject: Re: FBSD & old HDs
To: bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans)
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 1995 12:47:57 +0500 (GMT+0500)
Cc: hackers@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199507040622.QAA12484@godzilla.zeta.org.au> from "Bruce Evans" at Jul 4, 95 04:22:53 pm
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> 
> >In all cases FreeBSD version was 2.0-950210-SNAP.
> 
> >May be somebody had the same problems ? It will be very interesting for
> >me to know why was the problem with 2nd box ?
> 
> Very old drives can have bad sectors.  You have to use bad144 on them.
> bad144 didn't work on 950210.

But MS-DOS worked absolutely OK on them and FBSD absolutely didn't worked
with XEBEC drive. I think the first thing FBSD should try to read is
MBR, and then if there is no FBSD slice it should not try to read anything
else (at least for the install diskette). But it got problems at the first
request to HDU (at least it seems so). Once more proof against bad sectors
is that BSDI 1.1 was installed without any problems on this drive on the
same machine.

> I'm not sure how old your drives are.  If they are IDE, maybe they are
> early IDE, before the standard settled.

Yes, maybe. But the `subject' is slightly misleading, really in the 2nd case
only computer was old, not the drive. IDE controllers are known to be simply
buffer logic with absolutely no intelligence, so I think there should be no
interference between old IDE controller and new drive.

		Serge Babkin

! (babkin@hq.icb.chel.su)
! Headquarter of Joint Stock Commercial Bank "Chelindbank"
! Chelyabinsk, Russia