Date: Tue, 19 Aug 1997 10:18:42 +0930 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: support@natsoft.com.au (Simon Bennet) Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD Partition Over 2048 Mega Bytes Message-ID: <199708190048.KAA14782@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <33F86CE6.6334@natsoft.com.au> from Simon Bennet at "Aug 18, 97 04:40:22 pm"
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Simon Bennet stands accused of saying: > > However I have encountered a couple of problems someone may be able > to help me with. > > I am attempting to install FreeBSD 2.2.2-RELEASE on a Pentium 150MHz > with a 3Gig IDE Hard Drive. > > When you run the bad block scan (bad144), at install time, it fails at > the 2048 MByte point with every block past there being reported as > an error. This happens whether the drive is in LBA or NORMAL mode. Simple answer : don't use bad144. It's only useful with disks that have bad sectors, and don't handle bad sector forwarding. Most modern IDE disks won't show any bad sectors until they are seriously dying, at which time it's cheaper to dump them and get another one than stuff around with badsector remapping. > Will FreeBSD support a single partition over 2048MBytes in length, > or is this just a problem with the bad block scanning program? It's just a problem with bad144, which dates back to the good ol' days of DEC RL02's, where a fingerprint on the disk surface might accidentally wipe out a few sectors. > Is there a way to get the bad track table to reside below cylinder 1024, > or is it safe not to use bad blocking on large IDE drives? The bad track table has to live at the end of the filesystem. > The kernel used was as loaded onto the system from the CD-ROM. > I was creating a file large enough to fill the 2.5GB partition, using > the c write() function wtiting 1024 bytes of data per write call, when > the IDE drive started to spin down and then up again, the drive > continued to spin down and up as though it was being turned off and > back on again. There were error messages displayed on the console, but > unfortunately I did not write them down. These would probably have been to do with the disk not responding. For an IDE disk to spin down it has to be _very_ unhappy. This may be because it's dead, or possibly just due to a dodgy power connector. > Is there a way FreeBSD can cause a hard drive to spin down and backup > again continually or have I encountered a hardware problem? It's _possible_ that you have encountered an incompatability between FreeBSD and your disk that results in the disk firmware crashing and being restarted, however you say you reinstalled and repeated the test which implies that this is not the case. As such, I'd say you have a hardware problem of some sort. -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control. (ph) +61-8-8267-3493 [[ ]] Unix hardware collector. "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick [[
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