more tales of RA81s--handling of bad sectors

[Steve Dyer]

We have three RA81 drives on a single UDA50.  We installed ULTRIX last week
without any problems and have been burning the system in before opening it
up for general use.  Within the last few days, two of the drives have developed
"hard errors" which were not present at the installation.  Naturally a few
of them reside in the swap area, thus randomly killing processes, and a few
reside in files like /usr/lib/aliases.pag.  Only a minor headache!

With an "ordinary" disk system, I'd probably reformat the drives (thus
marking these new sectors as bad).  This does not seem to be an option with
the RA81 series--my field service guy is recommending replacement of the
head/disk assembly, which seems reasonable given their early mortality, but
it seems unwise as a general practice.

My questions are:

	Is replacement the only solution to post-factory hard errors?
	Is there a formatter available for RA81's?
	Does it mark newly found bad sectors?
	Does the RA81 driver in ULTRIX handle bad sectors as claimed?

Some comments:

	You might as well be running pure AT&T System V for all the DEC
	field service people know about how to interpret ULTRIX console
	messages.

	There is apparently no "warranty" period for the ULTRIX software,
	at least as regards software support.  We haven't yet purchased
	a software maintenance agreement, since it isn't yet clear to me
	that ULTRIX is preferable to vanilla 4.2, if you have a source
	license.  But when I tried to call about this problem, I got the
	runaround about not having a software support agreement.  Naturally,
	a call to my DEC salesman, who knows the value of our account, was
	able to bypass this, but the person I spoke to was unable to offer
	any comment, having to promise to get back to me.
-- 
/Steve Dyer
{decvax,linus,ima,ihnp4}!bbncca!sdyer
sdyer at bbncca.ARPA