SCO and hard disk errors

[William E. Davidsen Jr]

Let me see if I can share some of my experiences here, even if it
doesn't supply "the" answer.

In article <51 at libove.UUCP> root at libove.UUCP (The Super User) writes:
[ brief desription of badtrack not finding all bad tracks ]

| 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).

  badtrack allows you to enter bad track info manually, and this can
include the manufacturer's defect list. The manufacturer uses better
equipment to find problems than a disk controller, and therefore will
find some tracks which are not found by a scan. You will have a better
chance of finding bad tracks using a low level format than a standard
format.

  In addition, bad tracks can change during shipping. I have had
badtrack identify tracks not on the original list, and not mark some
which were. If you have a reliable program to identify bad tracks, use
it, for sure.

| 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...

  Early versions of SCO (2.1.3) really didn't handle bad trqacks well.
Everytime I've gotten one I've had to recover more or less manually. I
see no evidence that I have had any errors on my 2.2.1 system, so I
can't comment. I would hope that there would be a way to remap stuff,
but the separation of the drivers and the kernel may be a problem here.

  Others please comment, my experience has been good after entering all
manufacturer's listed tracks.

| -- 
| Jay Libove               Internet: libove at cs.cmu.edu libove at andrew.cmu.edu
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-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu at ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me