Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!ccu.umanitoba.ca!herald.usask.ca!alberta!aunro!aupair.cs.athabascau.ca!atha!decwrl!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!munnari.oz.au!bruce!sol0!cechew From: cechew@sol0.cs.monash.edu.au (Earl Chew) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: /etc/update is hanging Message-ID: Date: 13 Mar 91 23:33:25 GMT References: <1991Mar12.225454.19910@viewlogic.com> Sender: news@bruce.cs.monash.OZ.AU Lines: 50 greg@suntan.viewlogic.com (Gregory Larkin) writes: >When I first made the partition, I ran "readall /dev/hd6" to >find the bad blocks. I then ran "badblocks" to get rid of >them (I think!). The problem may be that you used an `old' version of badblocks which had problems with large file systems. >I am now building libc.a and part way through the addition to >the archive, it stops. I hit "F1" and /etc/update has a "C" >flag. No other activity. The disk is making sounds like it >does when it's hitting a bld block. No messages about read >errors and the like have been printed. After about 15 >minutes, /etc/update unhangs and the archive continues to be >made. It could be that you've hit a large swarm of bad blocks. Bad block recovery can be very slow. From memory, I think that the standard driver doesn't report bad blocks unless the n-th retry fails (I can't remember what n is precisely). Thus if the blocks are just weak, after a couple of retries the operation succeeds. If you have a swarm of them, fs could spend a long time trying to sync(). >(Assuming this is a disk read/write error), >doesn't badblocks stop other programs, like "ar" from writing >to bad areas by allocating the bad blocks to files? Yes. See my comment above. Try to get hold of a new version of badblocks (ie one with the patch applied to fix the bug). >Is it a problem to mv the .BadXXXX files to a subdirectory >called "BAD". Does the mv kill the bad blocks information? No. mv simply makes a new directory link to the same inode. The bad block allocation is in the inode and is thus preserved. >Also, when I run fsck after badblocks, I get weird messages >about duplicate zones and missing bitmaps? Is this normal? This is almost certainly due to the bug in badblocks. You may also want to add to the bad block list those which are weak (ie cause several retries before succeeding). I hope this helps. Earl -- Earl Chew, Dept of Computer Science, Monash University, Australia 3168 EMAIL: cechew@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au PHONE: 03 5655778 FAX: 03 5655146 ----------------------------------------------------------------------