dave@oldcolo.UUCP (Dave Hughes) (08/29/90)
Hey, I have just installed SCO Unix 3.2.2 (sys 5) on a 333 mb Maxtor hard disk in a 33 mhz 386 and there are a handful of bad sectors on the disk all of which have been repeatedly reported by destructive low level scanning and automatic entry into the bad track table. But upon each boot, after the hardware status is reported, but before the SINGLE USER mode prompt comes up, it reports the bad sector it seems to be trying to read, including an ominous report that it had trouble in the swap space reading the 'memsize' value. The tracks are well into the swap table, so not right at the beginning. After 3 re-installs it does the same thing. Then (2) it has had trouble with bad sectors under the 'goodpw' program in bin, which has made some logons impossible. And with the incredibly complicated UNIX tcb security features, it has taken too much time repairing corrupted files caused by reboots without shutdowns. Here again it attempts to read a 40k utility on a throughly reported set of bad tracks and bombs over other time (and prevents even a tape backup past the point). Is this bizzare or what? I thot that unix would read the badtrack table, alias the sectors to some other tracks and keep on truckin. So what does it take to *REALLY* lock out bad tracks? (there are really very few reported for the huge drive, only about 10 seperate entries. And all the problems are on already tabled badtracks, not on any new ones.)