I'd like to note that 1.3.91+ is the first time I've been able to use my
Buslogic 445C + Fujitsu 230MB magneto-optical drive in ages. Turns out it
was a media problem which occurred when we moved in February---but the
drivers in 1.3.91 and better started providing truly sane error messages,
and I'm very much impressed....
Progress...
I still have problems with my machine freezing in that situation (reams of
bad sectors), and suspect that somewhere along the line error recovery is
not being handled properly at the filesystem level? Actually, that's an
ignorant comment, I haven't a clue. :)
I believe there is a bug in generic_file_read where a bad block will be retried
indefinitely. I haven't heard back from Linus on this yet, though.
Leonard