*BSD News Article 68372


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From: rjc@clark.net (Ray Cromwell)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: HELP!!!! Hard Error in root partition
Date: 12 May 1996 21:27:08 GMT
Organization: Clark Internet Services, Inc., Ellicott City, MD USA
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  I woke up this morning to discover my machine had crashed, and upon
rebooting it now has hard errors on blocks 272, 273, 274. The drive is
a Maxtor 800mb (wd0). The errors are in /dev/wd0a. I tried using
"badsect" to allocate the bad blocks and then run fsck, but it won't
write to /dev/wd0a period (input/output error) and fsck just unlinked
a few files, but system still won't boot without errors sending it
into single user mode.  However, I can still get directories and view
the files in / I booted with a fixit floppy and attempted to use
badsect but is says blocks 272-274 aren't in the data area. Finally, I
tried using bad144, first as bad144 -a wd0 272 273 274

and then as

bad144 -s -v wd0

  It scans the disk and finds the error, but it gets an error when it tries
to modify the bad sector table. Something like

"bad flag in bad sector table"
"bad magic number"
<whole bunch of trk/sec out of range errors>
"bad sector table out of order"
<whole bunch of trk/sec out of range errors>

  Is there anything I can do to recreate the bad sector table from
scratch? Right now, I'd be happy if I could just back up wd0a
properly and newfs that partition, but I'm guessing that won't fix it?
Will I have to low-level format?  I'm buying a new 2gig drive 
today to replace wd0, but I'd still like to fix this drive up and extract
some useful data off of it before I write it off.

Thanks in advance,
-Ray