*BSD News Article 68147


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: New SNAP and swap problems
Date: 9 May 1996 21:17:08 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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References: <aak2.831366925@ra.msstate.edu> <4modd6$aut@uriah.heep.sax.de>
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Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch)
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aak2@Ra.MsState.Edu (Atif Ahmad Khan) wrote:

> Strange thing is that I only get the errors on the swap partition and
> not any other partitions, no matter how much I thrash them.  I also 
> FAT formatted the drive and ran surface scans and got no errors.

Surface scans are often poor indications in case your problem is of
``dynamic'' nature.  I've got a dead SCSI disk which i can format and
read fine as long as i'm doing sequential reads.  However, as soon as
i'm using it (in my test machine) for some time, there will be a point
at which it starts to spit out ``Recorded entity not found'' and such,
indicating that it apparently runs into seek problems.  I suspect it's
positioning to the wrong cylinder, and it finally doesn't recover from
this accident.  (It sometimes recovers for a short amount of time by
powering off and on again.  Don't laugh, it's SCSI. :) The system can
often cope with this, and usually doesn't crash immediately.)

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)