Re bad block sparing

John G. De Armond jgd at rsiatl.UUCP
Mon Dec 4 17:55:06 AEST 1989


I tried routing this to you in mail but it failed soooo... 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

In article <5609 at uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> you write:
>I posted an article last week regarding use of the mkpart(1M) command.
>I ended up supposedly resolving my problem by reformatting my drive.
>The drive had been running fine for approx. 2 months when I encountered
>the following message from the ISC 2.02 driver:
>
>*** DEVICE ERROR: Uncorrectable data error in sector ***
>*** Controller 0 (Primary AT Hard Disk), Disk 0 Absolute Sector # nnnnnn
>

Did you get the mail I sent regarding your last posting?  I provided 
rather detailed instructions as to how to handle this situation.  I 
suppose I could dig up a copy if you didn't get it.

To fix the problem, use the command:

mkpart -A <bad sector number> disk01 (or whatever your disk number is)
									 (from /etc/partitions           )

If the drive is mounted, you will the the V_REMOUNT  failure message.
Simply unmount and remount the partition or reboot to make the bad sector 
remap take effect.


Note that /etc/partitions is NOT updated to reflect bad sectors you enter
with -A.  This file is simply an initialization template to be used for
defaults.  If you want to see the actual VTOC, invoke mkpart with the
following command line:

mkpart -tvpa disk01

This tells mkpart to print out the (v)olume, (p)artition, and (a)lternate
block tables.   You can redirect to a file if you desire.  I highly recommend
printing out a copy of this statistic for if you ever have to rebuild from
scratch.  RTFM for details.

I have found the mkpart options to do a surface analysis and to include
bad blocks from /etc/partitions to be unreliable with a scsi controller.
Therefore I do the bad block allocation separate from /etc/partitions
via a short script that inputs the list of bad blocks one at a
time into a -A command line.

John
-- 
John De Armond, WD4OQC                     | Manual? ... What manual ?!? 
Radiation Systems, Inc.     Atlanta, GA    | This is Unix, My son, You 
emory!rsiatl!jgd          **I am the NRA** | just GOTTA Know!!! 



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