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Date:      Mon, 25 Sep 1995 01:18:22 -0700
From:      Jeffrey Hsu <hsu>
To:        sos@FreeBSD.org
Cc:        hackers
Subject:   Re: disk going bad?
Message-ID:  <199509250818.BAA05291@freefall.freebsd.org>

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  > It doesn't and thats why you get the errors.

Let's distinguish between hardware and software errors.  Here's
what I think is going on.  Please correct me immediately if I'm
wrong at any step.  With bad read block reallocation, the hard
drive will automatically replace references to the bad block w/ a
reference to a working block, right?  This means fsck can only
detect corrupt directory blocks, since it has no way to check the
integrety of data files.  Thus, aside from the new bad sectors,
the drive is still safe to use, right? The concern from the hardware
point of view is whether this is predictive of a general hardware
catastrophe or of a slow degenerative failure.

>From the fs point of view, the bad directories (references to new
uninitialized blocks) can be corrected by fsck.  I just have some
bad directories which I need to replace from backup or some other
source.  And I have possibly some undetected bad data blocks
somewhere, which I can also try to find by comparison w/ a recent
backup.

  > What I'm interested in is what kind of controller/disk you are using
  > since I have a combination that produces these error very predictably
  > though I seem to be the only one having seen this...

I have an UltraStor 34F (anyone want to buy one cheap?) and the
drive which in question is a Quantum Empire 2100S.

It's interesting and puzzling to note that the read failures are not
completely reproducible.  Some blocks which failed at one point are
readable now.  The whole thing has me pretty spooked about the
continued reliance on this drive and I've since moved my home
directory off it.

							Jeffrey



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