Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix Subject: Re: SCO and hard disk errors Keywords: sco,hard disk,errors,bad handling Message-ID: <11391@steinmetz.ge.com> Date: 27 Jun 88 18:39:34 GMT References: <51@libove.UUCP> Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) Distribution: comp Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY Lines: 48 Let me see if I can share some of my experiences here, even if it doesn't supply "the" answer. In article <51@libove.UUCP> root@libove.UUCP (The Super User) writes: [ brief desription of badtrack not finding all bad tracks ] | My solution is to back up everything and reformat the drive with a utility | that really checks out for bad blocks, and marks them as unusable. Who | cares about the extra megabyte I lose if it keeps potential explosions from | happenning (and keeps that awful wait during recalibration from occurring). badtrack allows you to enter bad track info manually, and this can include the manufacturer's defect list. The manufacturer uses better equipment to find problems than a disk controller, and therefore will find some tracks which are not found by a scan. You will have a better chance of finding bad tracks using a low level format than a standard format. In addition, bad tracks can change during shipping. I have had badtrack identify tracks not on the original list, and not mark some which were. If you have a reliable program to identify bad tracks, use it, for sure. | The point of this post, anyhow, is to ask if anyone else has experienced | this type of behaviour, or has any opinions on SCO's disk drive device | drivers. Perhaps we could convince SCO to go a little more conservative | on the drivers' retry attempts... Early versions of SCO (2.1.3) really didn't handle bad trqacks well. Everytime I've gotten one I've had to recover more or less manually. I see no evidence that I have had any errors on my 2.2.1 system, so I can't comment. I would hope that there would be a way to remap stuff, but the separation of the drivers and the kernel may be a problem here. Others please comment, my experience has been good after entering all manufacturer's listed tracks. | -- | Jay Libove Internet: libove@cs.cmu.edu libove@andrew.cmu.edu | 5313 Ellsworth Avenue formtek!ditka!libove!libove@pt.cs.cmu.edu | Pittsburgh, PA 15232 UUCP: cmucspt!formtek!ditka!libove!libove | (412) 621-9649 cadre!pitt!darth!libove!libove -- bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa) {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me