Two Questions

[John M. Sully]

In article <403 at dalek.UUCP> sjb at dalek.UUCP (Seth J. Bradley) writes:
>1.  I have been unable to get mailx to initialize with
>either /usr/lib/mailx/mailx.rc or ~/.mailrc, both of
>which should work according to the documentation.
>What's wrong?

Make sure that the files are readable by group "mail".  Both of these 
facilities are known to work more or less properly -- although they 
will not affect delivery of mail (done through rmail) only sending and
reading.

>2.  The bad block scanning routine in fdisk only
>does one scan.  Also, showbad doesn't show anything
>on a scanned disk.  How can I be really sure that
>I've picked up all the bad blocks?  Is there any
>any public domain software out there that gives
>greater assurance?

The fdisk bad block scanning does only a single read only scan of the disk
and therefore is not really as effective as it might be.  If showbad does
not show any tracks in the bad track map that means that no bad tracks were
detected by fdisk during the scan.

The best thing to do is to type in the bad track map supplied with your drive
and to then use fdisk to pick up any additional offending tracks.  Although I
do not know of any public domain software which does media analysis, I can
heartily recommend SpeedStor's disk analysis program which does an excellent
job.

John Sully