Automatic bad sector mapping (was: Re: Mapping abs sector ...)

[Conor P. Cahill]

john at jwt.UUCP (John Temples) writes:

>Which of the 386 UNIXes do automatic bad sector mapping?  I know that
>ESIX does, and ISC 2.0.2 does not.  What about the newer ISCs, AT&T,
>SCO, and the various SVR4 implementations?  This is a *really* nice
>feature, in my opinion.

It is not a nice feature at all. At one time we were running Bell
Technologies 3.1 or so and it had automatic bad sector mapping.  
This caused great headaches when a directory magically appeared with 
bogus data in the middle, or an executable all of a sudden has a 
block of zeros in the middle of it.  

Our hardware at the time (also Bell Tech) had a problem with static
electricity that would cause a series of sectors to appear bad whenever
the machine was touched.  This torched our system several times and
the only way to fix it was a full restore (trying to patch around
it is almost impossible when /usr/bin or /bin get blown away).

Yes, it sould be easier to map blocks, but IMHO automatic mapping is 
not the answer.
-- 
Conor P. Cahill            (703)430-9247        Virtual Technologies, Inc.
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