adding bad blocks using 386/ix

Darryl Richman darryl at ism780c.isc.com
Tue Mar 6 08:03:20 AEST 1990


There seems to be much confusion as to how mkpart, /etc/partitions, and
bad block handling occur on 386/ix.  There is nothing magical about it
and the whole system is rather manual in nature, so that nothing really
happens unless the user drives it.

When the disk driver first opens a disk, it reads in the pdinfo, vtoc,
and if indicated by the alts_ptr field, an alternates table.  The
alternates indicated are then maintained in an incore table by the
driver, until either a last close occurs or a V_REMOUNT ioctl is
successful.  (V_REMOUNT can only be successful if no other partitions
on the disk are open.) So in general, remaps do not occur right away,
but rather after the next reboot.

The contents of /etc/partitions are never used except by mkpart.

Mkpart strictly manipulates the on-disk structures such as the pdinfo,
vtoc, and alternates.  It does attempt to perform a V_REMOUNT
afterwards, but this will fail on a normally running system.  (If this
were not prevented, imagine what would happen to anything using the
disk if things like the vtoc were to change at a random point:
partitions might change size or location, or even disappear.)  By
running mkpart -A, you update the on-disk structure.  When you next
perform a first open (e.g., reboot), these bad sectors are then
remapped.

This is a better approach than automatically remapping because that
prevents the user from attempting to reread the bad sector and possibly
retrieving the data.

AT&T had originally expected to use the V_ADDBAD ioctl to update the
driver's list of bad blocks in memory, but the V.3.2.0 version, on which
386/ix 2.0.2 is based, did not include this functionality.  (I believe
that they have added it in a later release.)  The upcoming 2.2 release
of 386/ix will have the V_ADDBAD capability as well as a new alternate
sectoring scheme that does not rely on fixed table sizes (that have
proven to be too small).

		--Darryl Richman

-- 
Copyright (c) 1990 Darryl Richman    The views expressed are the author's alone
darryl at ism780c.isc.com 		      INTERACTIVE Systems Corp.-A Kodak Company
 "For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong."
	-- H. L. Mencken



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