Bad blocks

[Art Neilson]

This evening when building/installing Cnews on my new ST4383E drive,
I encountered the following message from doit.bin:

cp: bad copy to /usr/lib/newsbin/ctime.

I tried deleting /usr/lib/newsbin/ctime and ran doit.bin again, only to have
the problem pop up again in another file.  After reruning doit.bin several
times I finally got doit.bin to run cleanly, I then ran doit.news and
again.root.  I figured everything was okay, so I backed up my entire /usr/local
tree via afio to tape.  Afio had an I/O error reading /usr/local/bin/readnews,
after the backup was complete I tried deleting /usr/local/bin/readnews and
copied a new one from my cnews source tree into /usr/local/bin.  I then tried
copying the new /usr/local/bin/cnews to /tmp just to be sure it was OK, sure
enuf I got the message cp: bad copy to /tmp/readnews.  After speaking with a 
friend on the phone, we determined it must be a bad block on the disk.  
Unfortunately, without the absolute sector number I can't map the block out
with mkpart -A.  I tried bringing the system down to single and ran the
mkpart -v disk0 command, it Verified all 623220 sectors (510 sect per cyl)
and didn't report any new bad blocks.  When the mkpart completed, it spewed
out this message: TOO MANY BAD SECTORS ON DRIVE! now I really haven't had
a lot of disk troubles with this drive, I've had a few Device error messages
crop up regarding bad sectors,  and have had no problem mapping them out with
mkpart -A <sect> disk0, as the Device error message always reports the number
of the sector in error.  I ended up moving /usr/local/readnews to .badblock
so as to keep the bad block allocated, and then got yet another copy of
readnews from my cnews source tree.  At least the bad block is now contained
in a file and I know where that is.  My questions are how come the only message
I get regarding the bad block is from cp, and how can I find out the sector
number so I can map it out.  Lastly, what the heck is wrong with mkpart, why
does it think I have "too many bad sectors" on my drive ???
-- 
Arthur W. Neilson III		| ARPA: art at pegasus.com
Bank of Hawaii Tech Support	| UUCP: uunet!ucsd!nosc!pegasus!art