How does Microport System V/AT handle bad blocks?

[Mark Zenier]

In article <464 at tarpit.UUCP>, rd at tarpit.UUCP (Bob Thrush) writes:
> Are these problem reports regarding
> 2.4 not as serious as a casual reader would assume?  

2.4 is a great improvement over 2.3.  The screen seems a bit faster and
the floppy disk driver doesn't crash the system if the wrong device is used
for doscp.  And my keyboard locked up just as much with 2.3, until I bought 
a decent one.

> The 2nd disk (that I'm having trouble with) is mostly used as the news
> spool directory, so it is definitely getting a whole lot different 
> activity than it did before the onset of the problems.  Each time the
> problem shows up, I find that each subsequent fsck finds more problems,
> usually associated with duplicates in the free list.  

Your problem sounds like the canonical Two Drive bug that was the topic of
much discussion here a couple of months ago.  The problem was (microport
correct me if I'm wrong) that divvy didn't set up the bad track areas on
the second drive correctly.  This is fixed either with 2.4 or by getting
a fixed 2.3 divvy utility from the uport bulliten board.


Mark Zenier    uunet!nwnexus!pilchuck!ssc!markz    markz at ssc.uucp
                      uw-beaver!tikal!