Re: SCSI Sector Size Problem

Nicholas J. Leon (lists-nicholas@binary9.net)
Fri, 1 Nov 1996 19:14:48 -0500 (EST)

#
# From: Matthew X Economou <econommx@rose-hulman.edu>
# Date: 31 Oct 1996 16:34:01 -0500
#
# Why doesn't mke2fs do proper bad-block checking? I've had several
# floppies that had bad sectors on them that either (a) weren't detected
# by fdformat or (b) weren't detected by mke2fs. My only option was to
# format them with (Yggdrasil's) mkdosfs, which actually does the
# bad-block checking.
#
# mke2fs will do bad-block checking if you use the -c option. This, like
# MS-DOS reads the entire disk drive during its high-level format. The
# problem is that this doesn't catch all errors.
#

It doesn't even catch the errors it reports. I have to disagree,
mke2fs (with the -c option) doesn't do anything about the bad blocks.

Example: I was reformatting a drive the other day and had a HOST of
errors. In one window I had a "tail -f /var/log/kernel" running,
watching the errors appear:

hdb: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hdb: read_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=306946, sector=306945
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:41, sector 306945

Then after all is said and done, I do a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb"
and sure enough, I get errors in the exact same locations.

If mke2fs was mapping (or marking) those blocks away, I wouldn't get
the error again, would I? Or am I missing something vital here?

N!
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Nicholas J. Leon nicholas@binary9.net
"Elegance through Simplicity" http://www.binary9.net/nicholas

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