Info wanted on bad blocks, IDE drives, and UNIX drivers

[Phil Hochstetler]

I recently purchased a 386 PC with a 80MB IDE drive and am trying to
understand the IDE drive and how it handles bad blocks.  Unfortunately,
the documentation I have does not do a good job.  It implies that when
you run DOS on the disk that the fdisk program will scan the partition
and complain if any bad sectors are found.

If you run UNIX on this same hardware setup, how does UNIX treat this
disk with respect to bad blocks? (what are the limits and what you can
do with the hardware in this regard if you have UNIX disk driver source and
what do most UNIX drivers out there do).  

How about installing UNIX and DOS both on one disk, allowing you to boot
one then the other.  Do the bad block scheme of DOS drivers get in the way
of the UNIX driver?  Inquiring minds want to know.

-- 
Phil Hochstetler		UUCP:        uunet!sequent!phil
Sequent Computer Systems	INTERNET:    phil at sequent.com
Beaverton, Oregon