tyager@maxx.UUCP (Tom Yager) (06/28/90)
In article <4524@cvl.umd.edu>, liuqing@cvl.umd.edu (Larry Liuqing Huang) writes: > I am trying to install ISC 2.0.2 on a 386 machine with a 120 meg hard disk. > After the "surface analysis" it says "too many bad sectors" and terminated > the installation procesure. I can not cut the hard disk into pieces of > small partitions. > > 1). Is there any way to get around this problem? > 2). Is this fixed in the new release of ISC 2.2? > > Thanks for your help. > liuqing@cvl.umd.edu It's hard to diagnose this because you don't mention what type of disk controller and disk drive you're using. The surface analysis utility will report as bad any sector that it can't write with a known value and read back. The inability to write a sector is not necessarily a symptom of a disk drive bad spot. Here's a few things you might check: - Make sure you're using a controller supported by 386/ix. That includes MFM, most ESDI and RLL controllers, and Adaptec and Future Domain SCSI controllers. If you're using ESDI or RLL, the controller must provide exact emulation of a Western Digital MFM controller. - Take the time to check (again) for loose cables. Even if they look tight, pull the connectors off and put them on again. If they don't fit snugly over the pins on the controller or drive, replace the cable. Same thing for any visible damage to the cable itself. Also look for bent pins on the controller board. - Double-check the interleave at which you formatted the drive. It must match the interleave factor you provided during 386/ix installation. If you didn't do a low-level format of the drive, consider doing it and specifying a known interleave. - Check your system's bus speed. Many disk controllers expect to be run in a standard AT bus: 8 MHz or less. If your system has jumpers or SETUP parameters controlling bus speed, make sure you're running at a standard speed. If you want to narrow the problem down, there's two things you might try. First, install DOS on the system. Doing a DOS format on a partition does a rudimentary bad track check. When the format finishes, use CHKDSK to find out how much space is taken up by bad tracks. If it's high (say, more than 10%), be very suspiscous of your hardware. Lastly, next time you try to do a surface analysis with the 386/ix install, write down the first few sectors reported bad. Run the analysis again, and compare the new numbers with your list. If they match, it's likely you really do have a bad drive. Unless, that is, the analysis simply reports all the sectors as bad. If it's any consolation, I've run into problems like yours before (hence the long list of suggestions), but it's always turned out to be something easy to fix. Good luck! (ty) -- +--Tom Yager, Technical Editor, BYTE----Reviewer, UNIX World---------------+ | NET: decvax!maxx!tyager -or- uunet!bytepb!maxx!tyager | | I speak only for myself "UNIX: It's not a job, | +-------------------------------------it's a Jihad!" -co-worker------------+
david@csource.OZ.AU (david nugent) (06/28/90)
In <4524@cvl.umd.edu> liuqing@cvl.umd.edu (Larry Liuqing Huang) writes: >I am trying to install ISC 2.0.2 on a 386 machine with a 120 meg hard disk. >After the "surface analysis" it says "too many bad sectors" and terminated >the installation procesure. I can not cut the hard disk into pieces of >small partitions. >1). Is there any way to get around this problem? >2). Is this fixed in the new release of ISC 2.2? Is it a SCSI drive? If so, skip that step. david -- _______________________________________________________________________________ Unique Computing Pty Ltd Melbourne Australia - Communications Specialists david@csource.oz.au 3:632/348@fidonet 28:4100/1@signet
pejn@wolfen.cc.uow.oz (Paul Nulsen) (06/30/90)
tyager@maxx.UUCP (Tom Yager) writes: >In article <4524@cvl.umd.edu>, liuqing@cvl.umd.edu (Larry Liuqing Huang) writes: >> I am trying to install ISC 2.0.2 on a 386 machine with a 120 meg hard disk. >> After the "surface analysis" it says "too many bad sectors" and terminated >> the installation procesure. I can not cut the hard disk into pieces of >> small partitions. ... >It's hard to diagnose this because you don't mention what type of disk >controller and disk drive you're using. ... Working from memory here, but I believe that this is a problem with the (small and fixed) size of the alternate sector map. I ran into the same problem when installing 386/ix on my system. It appears that during the low level disk format some software marks the whole of a track as bad when it contains one bad sector. The surface analysis counts all of these bad sectors, increasing the actual number of defects by a factor of about 17 (or whatever). For me the solution was to hand just a little bit more of the disk back to DOS, but this probably would not suit you. The best solution would be to rerun the low level format and either: use a formatting routine that does not mark the whole of a track as bad; or don't enter any defects during the low level format. In the latter case you can give the defect list to 386/ix and let it map out the bad sectors. Of course, if you really have too many defects ... Paul Nulsen pejn@wolfen.cc.uow.edu.au
clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis) (07/05/90)
In article <4524@cvl.umd.edu>, liuqing@cvl.umd.edu (Larry Liuqing Huang) writes: > I am trying to install ISC 2.0.2 on a 386 machine with a 120 meg hard disk. > After the "surface analysis" it says "too many bad sectors" and terminated > the installation procesure. I can not cut the hard disk into pieces of > small partitions. > 1). Is there any way to get around this problem? > 2). Is this fixed in the new release of ISC 2.2? We had a similar problem when we installed a Maxtor XT1140. I was able to work around this (I can't remember the precise details but this is close) by formatting with one of the specialized DOS formatters (Speedstor to be exact), making *it* do surface analysis and alternation, *then* installed Interactive and told it to bypass the format step. We've not had a problem with it since. (thinking back on this, I'm not even sure Speedstor's alternation was ignored by interactive or not... I probably have the details wrong, so you should experiment, possibly using interactive to format the disk, then speedstor to do the alternation then installing interactive. All I *really* remember is that speedstor did the trick, and the order of operations was wierd ;-) It is possible that there's a cabling or hardware problem, but speedstor should be able to tell you that (eg: if you get more than 1-2% bad sectors, you should recheck the cabling/grounding etc.). -- Chris Lewis, Elegant Communications Inc, {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis Ferret mailing list: eci386!ferret-list, psroff mailing list: eci386!psroff-list