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From: XBR1Y013@DDATHD21.BITNET (H. HONAL)
Newsgroups: mod.computers.vax
Subject: How to get rid of bad blocks on a disk (without distroying all data) ?
Message-ID: <8701220422.AA07995@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Wed, 21-Jan-87 23:45:17 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8701220422.AA07995
Posted: Wed Jan 21 23:45:17 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 22-Jan-87 04:10:06 EST
Sender: molbio@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The ARPA Internet
Lines: 29
Approved: info-vax@sri-kl.arpa

On one of our (not very reliable) RP07 disks we do have bad blocks.
One of the bad blocks was located in a swap file - this resulted in several
crashes during the past days (INSWAP READ ERROR).
We have located the defective block by running BACKUP against that file

 BACKUP device:[directory]swapfile.sys NL:DUMMY /SAV /IGNORE=INTERLOCK

with this method we found the actual adress on the disk in the ERRORLOG
(CYL , TRACKS, SECTOR no. )  and  BACKUP told us the relative Block in the
dataset.
Now the question: how can we get rid of this defective block running the
BAD utility? In the manual BAD BLOCK LOCATOR Utility Ref.Manual on page BAD-2
it is mentioned that BAD /NOEXCERCISE/BAD_BLOCK=.... will update the DBBF
(detected bad block file) and:
"after BAD locates and records the bad blocks, you issue the DCL command
 INITIALIZE to change the volume from unstructured format to Files-11
 format and allocate the faulty blocks to a special file on the volume called
 [000000]BADBLK.SYS. In this way, users are protected from accessing them
 for their files..."

Well - INIT destroys your data (all 516 Megabytes of user data....)
Any help or hint is appreciated.

Walter Reichenbaecher
Techn.University of Darmstadt, West Germany

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