Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!mailrus!ulowell!hawk!sgerakin
From: sgerakin@hawk.ulowell.edu (Steve Gerakines)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: fix to diskcheck(1)
Message-ID: <1323@ul-cs.ulowell.edu>
Date: 28 Sep 90 14:09:17 GMT
References: <31216@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Sender: news@ul-cs.ulowell.edu
Reply-To: sgerakin@hawk.ulowell.edu (Steve Gerakines)
Organization: University of Lowell, CS Dept.
Lines: 30

In article <31216@nigel.ee.udel.edu> unix3@ce.chalmers.se (Unix Internt. Labgrupp 3) writes:
>  I have been thinking about this ever since I first saw the diskcheck source.

Ouch.  diskcheck makes me too uneasy to use.  The thought of a program
writing to, and fiddling with every sector on a partition makes me
feel a little uneasy...  I usually just use readall to give it a quick
check-up.  Of course, diskcheck is better at finding sectors that are
on their way out.

readall could be made much more useful if two small enhancements were
made to them.  First is that most hard drive controllers (and the kernel)
can recover from touchy sectors that it reads.  For example on my hard
drive, I *know* there are a few bad sectors because when they're read,
my hard drive makes kind of a buzzing noise.  After multiple re-tries,
it will finally, and successfully, read the sector.  Maybe if there
was a timer when a sector is read, if the timer went off, then the sector
read would be considered bad, and reported.  The other small enhancement
is that (I think) errors are reported as sector numbers, instead of
block numbers.  If they were in blocks, it would be more useful with the
badblocks program.  I know it's easy to figure out which sector maps to
which block, but as far as my hard drive goes, I don't like leaving
anything to the imagination.  :-)


-Steve Gerakines

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