peyton@hplabs.UUCP (11/09/88)
Reply-to: peyton@hplabs.UUCP Has anyone tried replacing bad blocks on ra81s using radisk ? When I try to use it, it fails, printing the error message "Ra1:Replacement of LBN 8454 failed, Volume is Software Write Protected" and hangs. I have checked to make sure that the write protect button is off. I am assuming that the reason I got this message is that the disks aren't labelled properly, because I was able to replace a bad block on ra0, which is the disk that ULTRIX-32 release 2.3 is installed on. I executed radisk with "-s 0 891072" /dev/rra1c as arguments, ra1 had a beta release of 1.x ULTRIX. After not having any success with radisk, I tried formatting the disk using format(8v). I originally tried executing this command in single-user mode, but was unable to find the command. The man page gives instructions for formatting on a 780, but only mentions that for a 750 the format command is loaded from the root file system. I looked in the root file system, but cannot find the format command, should it be in / and should I be able to run it in single user mode or do I need to run it from the console subsystem ? If from the console subsystem, can someone send me the instructions for loading it (I don't have a console 750 subsystem manual). And after I get the disk formatted, assuming that's necessary, in the future, shouldn't I beable to use radisk to replace bad blocks without reformatting the entire disk ? The reason we are trying all of the above is that we have a few RA81s that we don't want to throw away (although we probably would be better off junking them) and have decided to store files on them that aren't accessed very often. In the past when bad blocks developed (we were running 4.3 at the time) we would have someone come out and either replace the drive or reformat it and then we would restore the data. This is a very time consuming process and at the rate they develop bad blocks we through that it would be nice if we could just replace the bad blocks and recover the data if possible. BTW, we are running ULTRIX-32 release 2.3 on a VAX 750. The two RA81's in question are located on UNIBUS adaptor 0, drive numbers 1 and 2. Please send responses directly to me, since I am not too sure about the reliability of our info-ultrix feed. Thanks. Domain: peyton@css.itd.nrl.navy.mil Uucp: uunet!peyton@nrl-css.arpa