Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1998 17:41:16 -0700 (PDT) From: Tom <tom@uniserve.com> To: David Babler <dbabler@Rigel.orionsys.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: HELP! IDE Hard Errors? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980913173348.21866B-100000@shell.uniserve.ca> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.02.9809131053490.785-100000@Rigel.orionsys.com>
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On Sun, 13 Sep 1998, David Babler wrote: > ship it back to Western Digital. After all, the conventional wisdom is > that if an IDE drive *reported* a hard error, your drive must be toast > because all of the drive's hidden reserved sectors had already been mapped That is conventional wisdom for SCSI drives with auto-relocation turned on. IDE drives may or may not be doing auto-relocation. IDE drives mor or may not have reserve sectors. There is just no way to tell. > out. WD wants you to run their diagnostic program before you do RMAs, so I > popped the drive into a DOS machine and ran wddiag. It said, sure enough, > that there were bad sectors. It then asked if I WANTED TO FIX THEM! Uh, > okay, I said yes - what did I have to lose? The "bad" sectors went away > and the drive passed days of running drive tests. It's been running > without a hitch ever since in a Novell file server. WD drives don't seem to have auto-relocation. wddiag does manual relocation. > My question is this: is there something REALLY wrong here, or is there > some facet of FBSD (or the kernel interaction with the drive) that is > preventing normal operation? If you look at the message log below, the You've described normal operation of WD IDE disk: wait for sectors to go bad, and then run wddiag to (hopefully) fix them. > SAME section of the disk is reported over and over - isn't there a > mechanism to map that as bad and never look at it again? Is the kernel Well, there is bad144 which does this within the filesystem. You don't want to use this unless you need it (for ESDI disks for one). > disabling any IDE "smarts" that is preventing the drive from doing > automatic repairs? Do I really need to down the system, boot DOS and run "IDE smarts"? Thats an oxymoron. IDE drives are dumb (and cheap). > the Western Digital diagnostics to fix this? Seems like a giant leap > backward to me. That's always been the way it is. You can try other vendors, which may or may not have auto-relocation. But the wddiag software is pretty powerful, and can even upgrade firmware. I don't know of any other IDE drives with upgradable firmware. Tom To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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