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Date: Sat, 26 Aug 1995 03:34:41 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199508251734.DAA26409@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: hackers@freefall.FreeBSD.org, peter@nmti.com
Subject: Re: ESDI drive woes
Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org
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>OK, I'm trying for the umpteenth time to install FreeBSD 2.0.5 on an
>ESDI drive.

>Drive is formatted with Disk Manager.

>Apparently when Disk Manager sees a bad sector, it "spares" the whole track.
>Unfortunately, FreeBSD doesn't know where to find the spare track, or the
>spare track is unformatted. Disk Manager won't format outside the official
>data space on the drive.

A non-braindamaged format program would only mark the bad sectors as bad
provided you aren't using firmware sector sparing (whole tracks are
normally marked as bad when there are too many bad sectors for the
firmware.

>The controller is an HP special. It looks like a WD1007 but doesn't appear
>to have a BIOS accessible through DEBUG, so I can't use the WD sector
>sparing even if I wanted to.

wdfmt supports it.  Get wdfmt from the WD archive.  Don't use WD sector
sparing if you can help it.

Disks with localized areas of dense bad sectors can be handled with
bad144 by not putting FreeBSD partitions over those areas.

Bruce