Re: Blockbusting news, this is important (Re: Why are bad disk sectors numbered strangely, and what happens to them?)

[bill davidsen]

In article <m3u166vjn0.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Krzysztof Halasa  <khc@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
| John Bradford <john@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
|
| > My most important point is that writes should never fail on a good
| > drive.
| 
| That's certainly what the drives do. Unless they are out of spare
| sectors, of course.
| 
| Doing cat /dev/zero > /dev/hd* fixes all bad sectors on modern drive.

Flash from the past, back in the days of MFM drives, and "new" RLL
controllers, we wrote software which regularly read all the data off a
track with appropriate retries, reformatted the track, wrote the data,
and read it back to verify. This was because of 'sector walk" which made
the sectors move relative to the IRG. And we wrote our own device
drivers to use large sectors to get more capacity, those were the days.

However, that's the kind of thing I would hope S.M.A.R.T. could do, with
relocation of course.
-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.
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