dmturne@PacBell.COM (Dave Turner) (01/31/91)
In article <5569@auspex.auspex.com> guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes: >Nope. This was discussed recently in "comp.unix", I think. In V7, the >root inode was moved from inode 1 to inode 2; the intent was apparently >to have inode 1 be the "bad block file", to which all disk blocks In 1976 I spent two week at Bell Labs in Piscataway, NJ working with the developers of PWB/UNIX (Programmer's WorkBench) which at that time was based on Edition 6. One of the developers told me that inode 1 being used to hold bad blocks was one of those *good ideas* that didn't work out. One of the reasons it didn't work was that volcopy (which trys to read entire tracks) couldn't be used for backup because the bad blocks were unreadable; placing them in inode 1 prevented them from being assigned to files but also prevented normal backups. About the only recourse was to reformat (at least a portion of) the disk. It was about this time that cpio (which began as two commands: cpi and cpo) was written to read what it could before the disk was reformatted. This was before fsck and fsdb were written. -- Dave Turner 415/823-2001 {att,bellcore,sun,ames,decwrl}!pacbell!dmturne