ISC 2.0.2 Installation Help Needed

[Paul Nulsen]

tyager at maxx.UUCP (Tom Yager) writes:

>In article <4524 at cvl.umd.edu>, liuqing at cvl.umd.edu (Larry Liuqing Huang) writes:
>> I am trying to install ISC 2.0.2 on a 386 machine with a 120 meg hard disk.
>> After the "surface analysis" it says "too many bad sectors" and terminated
>> the installation procesure.  I can not cut the hard disk into pieces of
>> small partitions.  ...

>It's hard to diagnose this because you don't mention what type of disk
>controller and disk drive you're using. ...

Working from memory here, but I believe that this is a problem with the
(small and fixed) size of the alternate sector map. I ran into the same
problem when installing 386/ix on my system. It appears that during the low
level disk format some software marks the whole of a track as bad when it
contains one bad sector. The surface analysis counts all of these bad
sectors, increasing the actual number of defects by a factor of about 17 (or
whatever).

For me the solution was to hand just a little bit more of the disk back to
DOS, but this probably would not suit you.

The best solution would be to rerun the low level format and either: use a
formatting routine that does not mark the whole of a track as bad; or don't
enter any defects during the low level format. In the latter case you can
give the defect list to 386/ix and let it map out the bad sectors.

Of course, if you really have too many defects ...

Paul Nulsen
pejn at wolfen.cc.uow.edu.au