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Date:      Tue, 26 May 1998 16:58:27 -0600
From:      Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com>
To:        Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
Cc:        Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com>, Michael Robinson <robinson@public.bta.net.cn>, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Bug in wd driver 
Message-ID:  <199805262258.QAA09021@mt.sri.com>
In-Reply-To: <199805262146.OAA01571@dingo.cdrom.com>
References:  <199805261502.JAA05071@mt.sri.com> <199805262146.OAA01571@dingo.cdrom.com>

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> > Having a bad spot on a disk shouldn't make the disk *totally* unusable,
> > as every other 'significant' OS can deal with fine.
> 
> This isn't a "bad spot" in the traditional sense - this is the disk
> firmware failing.

No, this is a bad spot on the disk.

> A "bad spot" gives you a recognisable, and recoverable, error.

Only if the bad spot can be remapped 'magically' behind the scenes, or
the spot is 'recoverable.  When your bad-sector table is filled, the
hard-disk is saying 'I can't read this anymore, so quit trying'.  The
FreeBSD driver says 'Please, try again', and again, and again, and
again...

> Note that DOS-derived operating systems will often dump their cookies in
> a similar fashion under the same circumstances (exact results seem to 
> vary, and I don't have a drive I can test this with anymore, having 
> consigned my last one to the dump before moving).

Not in my case.  Win95/DOS was able to recognize this and map it out.

> > This is also why I was w/out a laptop for 5 months, since our driver
> > couldn't get past the bad sector on the boot partition when it went bad
> > and everytime fsck tried to read it it locked up the computer. :(
> 
> So don't fsck it; I talked you through solving that problem, and you 
> ignored me.  8)

I couldn't *NOT* fsck it since init was were the bad-blocks was
located. (I think it was the inode).  All attempts to fix it or
workaround it didn't work, so I punted on it.

By the time I got DOS to remap it, I gave up on using FreeBSD on it,
since I figured it was only a matter of time before another bad-spot
showed up and I'd be in the same boat.



Nate

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