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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!mips!mips!darwin.sura.net!gatech!bloom-beacon!eru.mt.luth.se!lunic!sunic!aun.uninett.no!barsoom!barsoom!tih From: tih@barsoom.nhh.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: 2nd drive file system destroyed on re-boot Message-ID: <tih.713450893@barsoom> Date: 10 Aug 92 12:48:13 GMT References: <Bsp5D6.B9p@obiwan.uucp> <165f2uINN6an@disaster.Germany.EU.net> Sender: news@barsoom.nhh.no (USENET News System) Organization: Norwegian School of Economics Lines: 45 In article <Bsp5D6.B9p@obiwan.uucp>, bob@obiwan.uucp (Bob Willcox) writes: > I have discovered that specification of the sf key (bad sector forwarding) > in the disktab entry for my second disk results in distruction of the file > system on that disk. There's more to it than this, I think... I've modified the wd driver quite a bit by now, and have it working very well indeed with two controllers and 4 physical disk drives. Since the two controllers can run in parallell, distributing the load carefully over the disks gives quite good results. Heavy disk thrashing causes no troubles at all. However, for this scheme to work, I have to run the drives on the 2nd controller without the bad144 style bad sector forwarding. If, for instance, I run "disklabel -e -r wd3" and add the "badsect" flag to the disklabel, I can thereafter do a "bad144 wd3 0", and things will work just fine -- until the next reboot. As soon as the disk driver tries to read the bad sector table over at the end of the disk, it starts recalibrating (I think) like nobody's business. In fact, it gets so enthusiastic about shoving the heads back and forth that it managed to physically destroy an old Seagate drive I had hooked up to it! :-) This is with a warm reboot, however. If I turn the machine off, then on, things look a bit better: I can read the disk label, which shows the badsect flag, but if I run "bad144 wd3" to display the bad sector table, it turns out that it's all corrupt. I can use disklabel to remove the badsect flag, and I'll be OK again. bs@Germany.EU.net (Bernard Steiner) writes: >I noticed that with my ESDI drives I had to give disklabel one cylinder less >than what the physical drive parameters are... I thought of this too, but I've tried reducing the number of available cylinders to about a fourth of the real number with no improvement... I'm still debugging this stuff, prior to releasing the driver in its final form, so if anyone has any kind of input at all regarding problems with the sector forwarding code, please let me know! -tih -- Tom Ivar Helbekkmo, NHH, Bergen, Norway. Telephone: +47-5-959205 Postmaster for domain nhh.no. Internet mail: tih@barsoom.nhh.no