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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!menudo.uh.edu!uuneo!sugar!peter From: peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva) Subject: Re: bad144 problem? Organization: NeoSoft Communications Services -- (713) 684-5900 Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1993 11:28:18 GMT Message-ID: <CC3x77.I3s@sugar.NeoSoft.COM> References: <9322908.27770@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> <1993Aug16.180751.16931@crash> <24qnlt$s4p@hrd769.brooks.af.mil> Lines: 31 In article <24qnlt$s4p@hrd769.brooks.af.mil> burgess@hrd769.brooks.af.mil (Dave Burgess) writes: > With a full disk configuration, your bad sector table should be the last > track. There have been problems identified with disk drives that > physically have more than 1023 cylinders (which I think the disk in > question has), but I don't recall if this is specifically for those > units that have DOS loaded on them or not. OK, here's the problem near as I can understand it (I also have two Maxtor XT4380E drives). At boot, the system is still using the BIOS for I/O. It loads the bad sector table from the disk, and if you have more than 1024 cylinders it can't find it, so it panics. I seem to remember that there are patches out that let you put the bad sector table at other offsets, but I don't now if they're NetBSD-only or not. The ideal solution would be to make it a bad-sector partition like in System V, but I've been told (and I quite believe) that that would require WAY too much hacking to make it worthwhile in the near term. And long-term everyone's going to logically-perfect drives using SCSI or IDE (though that begs the question of what you do when you get NEW bad sectors... if the drive automatically remaps them you get invisible file-system corruption, and if it doesn't you still need bad sector handling). > IPL is an old mainframe term (Honeywell??) for 'Initial Program Load' as > I recall. IBM, I think. It was probably common in the industry, though. -- Peter da Silva. <peter@sugar.neosoft.com>. `-_-' Hefur thu fadhmadh ulfinn i dag? 'U` "Det er min ledsager, det er ikke drikkepenge."