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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!umn.edu!news.cs.indiana.edu!mikes@moose.cs.indiana.edu From: "Michael Squires" <mikes@moose.cs.indiana.edu> Subject: [386BSD] Checking disk for bad blocks Message-ID: <1992Nov17.235026.1564@news.cs.indiana.edu> Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 23:50:17 -0500 Lines: 19 I'm trying to use an older drive with a fair number of bad sectors on it, a Miniscribe 660MB ESDI drive. Running Spinrite under DOS I can lock out all of the bad/questionable sectors. I've also been able to write a disktab entry which is accepted by disklabel/newfs. Is there some standard method of writing data to a partition block by block and then reading it back to look for the really awful problems? The Adaptec drivers will output the block number when there is a disk error, but the WD drivers on the dist.fs disk will only indicate that there is an error. I can use the information from Spinrite to input to bad144, but that will lose 140MB as DOS can't handle the real drive parameters (over 1024 cylinders). Doing something like "cat /dev/wd0a > /dev/null" does not seem to find the problem blocks, although they show up quickly when trying to extract files. -- Mike Squires (mikes@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu) 812 855 3974 (w) 812 333 6564 (h) mikes@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu 546 N Park Ridge Rd., Bloomington, IN 47408