[comp.unix.xenix] Bad blocks on hard disk

romwa@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu (Mark Dornfeld) (06/12/88)

System: SCO Xenix V 386 ESDI 2.2.2, Compaq 386 16Mhz,
Omti 8620 ESDI controller, Compaq 130 Mb disk.

A while back I posted a note about one of my systems which was
reporting bad blocks on the hard disk but bad tracking found
no flaws.  

I was able to trace the bad writes to a uucp process.  All the
bad writes occurred coincidentally with my hub uucp system
calling this one over a 9600 bps direct line.  This hinted
that the disk wasn't bad, but rather something was out of sync
with the uucp programs.

A friend suggested I slow down the uucp and now I've gone a
whole week without an error message.  Seems to me like there
is something out of whack in the timing of the uucp disk
writes and the controller is sending an error message back to
the kernel.

I also did some rather confusing calculations to find out
which cylinders/tracks the had the errors and the pattern I
found was so different from any list of bad tracks I've seen
that this strengthened my suspicion that the problem was not
the disk.

Has anyone else noticed this problem?  SCO, do you know
anything about this?

Mark T. Dornfeld
Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queens Park
Toronto, Ontario, CANADA
M5S 2C6

mark@utgpu!rom      - or -     romwa@utgpu