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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msunews!uwm.edu!psuvax1!news.pop.psu.edu!hudson.lm.com!godot.cc.duq.edu!ddsw1!news.structured.net!news.teleport.com!news.teleport.com!not-for-mail From: bmk@teleport.com (bmk) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: [Q] fsck and 'medium error' problems + a new question Date: 20 Dec 1994 18:35:12 -0800 Organization: Department of Redundancy Department Lines: 68 Message-ID: <3d8490$7ul@sandra.teleport.com> References: <YOCUM.94Dec19155436@sparticus.gateway.cybernet.com> <3d5jbv$cun@agate.berkeley.edu> <3d68sn$dhv@linda.teleport.com> <3d76tm$20d@agate.berkeley.edu> Reply-To: bmk@teleport.com NNTP-Posting-Host: sandra.teleport.com In article <3d76tm$20d@agate.berkeley.edu>, Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh@violet.berkeley.edu> wrote: >In article <3d68sn$dhv@linda.teleport.com>, bmk <bmk@teleport.com> wrote: >>I'm getting something similar on one of my scsi disks. I'd rather not >>swap out the disk if I can fix it. Is there any sort of utility to >>mark defective blocks without reformatting the disk? > >For SCSI drives? I don't think so. I would bag the drive. You don't >need the grief. > FWIW, I reformatted the drive this morning. No small task, since it's my root drive. :( It seems to be working better now, the restore worked fine, no errors recorded. Time will tell if it's really better or not. I'm probably going to get the drive replaced eventually. Good news is, this is a Fujitsu with a 5 year warranty. Bad news is, I can't find the receipt for it. Last time I had a SCSI disk go south, Maxtor replaced it no questions asked, no receipt needed. It was even a couple of weeks out of warranty. Hopefully Fuji is as good about it. Unfortunately, if they won't cover it, I'll have to wait a few months to replace it, because I really can't afford to buy a replacement right now. So for now, I'll do my backups religiously and cross my fingers. Last time I had to do a restore, I had some difficulties that I was mostly able to avoid this time. I have been forced due to hardware conflicts to reconfigure my QIC-02 controller and ethernet card. The stock kernel on the 2.0-RELEASE install disk won't recognize them, so I copied my kernel onto the install disk. No problem there, I was expecting that. What I didn't expect was that there were some device special files in /dev that didn't exist, namely the rwt* devices. It seems to me that if a device is supported by the install kernel, it oughtta be in /dev. I did work around this by mknoding the files, but last time, I wansn't aware of this, and I couldn't recall the device major and minor numbers. *That* was a spin through hell, beleive me. My backups *and* my bindist were both on QIC-02 tape, so I was left with a system that I couldn't reinstall or restore. On the set of release disks, I would like to see one of two things: /dev entries for more devices, or a README file that documents the major/minor numbers for common hardware. Oh, and one more thing. Since restore isn't on the RELEASE install disk, I had to reinstall the install and cpio disks to do a restore. What troubled me about this is that I had to restore root as well, and I've been warned about using restore r on non-pristine filesystems. I was able to get it restored, but I had to do some juggling to do it. Would it be possible to put a statically linked copy of restore on the install disks, or is there just not enough room for it? Am I missing something here, is there an easier way to restore root? This brings to mind another question: When I ran Linux, there was a 'fixit' boot floppy that had a lot of useful repair tools, such as newfs, fsck, restore, etc. on it. It seemed possible under FreeBSD 1.1 to do the same, due to the separate kernel and filesystem floppies. I'm not sure it can be done easily under 2.0. I suppose that could build a second floppy and mount it in /dev/fd1, and copy /stand to it. This seems like it should work. Is there documented anywhere a procedure for making a standalone boot disk? I know how to make a bootable filesystem disk, but I don't know exactly what files are required and which are optional. I don't recall seeing this in the FAQ. -- bmk@dtr.com | bmk@teleport.com | bmk@atlas.com | finger -l bmk@teleport.com for PGP public key. http://www.teleport.com/~bmk/ * http://www.teleport.com/~bmk/patriot.html