SCO and hard disk errors

[The Super User]

I have SCO Xenix 2.2.1 running on an IBM PC/AT clone (made by PCs Limited)
and it has a Seagate Technologies ST4096 (80 megabyte) hard drive as the
root device, with a ST4026 (20 megabyte) mounted secondary filesystem.

The 20 meg drive has no flaws, but the 80 meg drive has a few bad tracks.
The Xenix bad track (badtrk) utility does not mark them all; it, like all
Xenix programs that use disk devices lets the kernel absorb a great deal
of bad returns before accepting something as bad - something that causes
a great deal of trouble with floppies - the Xenix utilities will often
write to a bad spot on a floppy (assuming that it *will* hold out, instead
of the more likely case that it will *not*) ... but anyway...

So, often I am running something disk intensive and the system starts
thrashing; that is, I hear the hard drive making its characteristic "seek
to root, attempt to seek to target sector again" noise.

My solution is to back up everything and reformat the drive with a utility
that really checks out for bad blocks, and marks them as unusable. Who
cares about the extra megabyte I lose if it keeps potential explosions from
happenning (and keeps that awful wait during recalibration from occurring).

The point of this post, anyhow, is to ask if anyone else has experienced
this type of behaviour, or has any opinions on SCO's disk drive device
drivers. Perhaps we could convince SCO to go a little more conservative
on the drivers' retry attempts...

-- 
Jay Libove               Internet: libove at cs.cmu.edu libove at andrew.cmu.edu
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