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From: hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at (Peter Holzer)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Question about readall(1)
Message-ID: <2381@tuvie.UUCP>
Date: 18 Mar 91 11:50:28 GMT
References: <1991Mar14.220659.6704@viewlogic.com>
Sender: news@tuvie.UUCP
Lines: 39

greg@suntan.viewlogic.com (Gregory Larkin) writes:

>I am using readall(1) in 1.5 to check my disk for bad
>blocks.  When I used to do this with the V1.3 readall,
>it used to stop for a bit when it hit a bad block and
>print a message like:

>Unrecoverable disk error on device 3/6, block 12000

>Now, it seems that the V1.5 readall just hangs on the
>bad block and doesn't print any error.  Sometimes it
>will stop for a few minutes, other times longer. It
>doesn't print any diagnostic message, so I can't tell
>what block it couldn't seek to.  That message comes
>from the FS, anyway, so I'm not sure what the problem
>is.

I had/have the same problem. Most of the time everything works
as it should (wini resets controller a few times, reports error
to FS, which prints the `Unrecoverable disk error' and returns
an I/O error to readall), but every now and then the wini task
just hangs waiting for `hardware'. It seems that the controller
does sometimes not send an interrupt when it hits a bad block,
or that the interrupt gets lost somewhere in the kernel. Maybe a
timeout for disk operations should be added to the driver. 

>(BTW, the disk is type 3, 32 meg, 6 heads, 17 secs/trk,
>it is installed as the 2nd physical drive in the system;
>it is all partitioned as /dev/hd6)

I have this problem only on the second hard disk, too. Maybe some
controller have problems with the second HD (I have an RLL
controller and 2 65MB-Drives)?

--
|    _  | Peter J. Holzer                       | Think of it   |
| |_|_) | Technical University Vienna           | as evolution  |
| | |   | Dept. for Real-Time Systems           | in action!    |
| __/   | hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at                 |     Tony Rand |