derek (07/30/82)
I was trying to bring up 4.1 on a VAX 780 with an RM80 disk drive. I found the drive contained some bad blocks in the root file system. 4.1's distribution tape contains standalone mkfs and restor. Mkfs would run but restor would find the bad blocks and die. The solution worked out here was to gen a mkfs on a tape (using a spare 750) which would test each block by reading it before putting it into the freelist. If a block was found to be bad, it was not entered into the freelist. The system could then be restored and booted. There were some missing blocks but they were captured using /etc/badsect. Perhaps future distributions should contain this 'fix' until they have standalone drivers which handle bad blocks. Derek Andrew U of Saskatchewan