Increasing size of HD "badblocktable" on 3B1

[Thad P Floryan]

I received a phone call today from another UNIXPC user who has, putting it
kindly, some "flaky" HDs in that they have a lot of known bad sectors.  His
question was whether it's possible to increase the size of the HD's bad block
table to accomodate the excessive number of bad sectors.

The "iv" description file permits specifying the size of the bad block table
using the "badblocktable" keyword followed by the number of blocks to be used
expressed in terms of 1024-byte logical "blocks."

QUESTION: has anyone actually tested whether a "badblocktable" size greater
than 1 actually works?

He's presently running 3.51 and stated that one of his drives has some 118
bad sectors and that another has over 128 bad sectors; he wants to use these
drives on his UNIXPC.   (Need I say that they're Seagate ST251 drives?  :-)

Thanks in advance for any insights or comments on this question.

Thad

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]