Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!imagen!atari!apratt
From: apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: SH204 disk errors
Message-ID: <933@atari.UUCP>
Date: 7 Jan 88 00:51:19 GMT
References: <46@lzaz.ATT.COM>
Organization: Atari Corp., Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 29

in article <46@lzaz.ATT.COM>, hcj@lzaz.ATT.COM (HC Johnson) says:
> 
> After discussing this with Chris at BMS I learned the following:
> 3. SH204 CANNOT report ANY ERROR to the computer.

That's just not true.  I don't know why he thought so.  CRC errors,
seek errors, sector-not-found errors all can be presented to the CPU
as error conditions after a seek, read, or write operation.

> BTW, hdx CANNOT mark as bad the blocks in the root directory or the SAMS.

I assume you mean FATs, not SAMS...  I don't know where your terminology
comes from.  But it's not HDX's fault, and certainly not the
controller's.  That's the fault of MS-DOS, of which GEMDOS is an
approximate clone.  We never claimed we could do bad-block forwarding,
and there's no other way to mark blocks which are bad in the part of the
disk that holds the bad-block information.

It *is* HDX's fault that it doesn't record bad blocks very well.  For
instance, it doesn't remember bad blocks when you repartition or reformat
the disk.  We at Atari are building new hard disk tools which will
record bad blocks better, and keep track of them across repartitioning
and reformatting.  Furthermore, it will refuse to put a partition header
(the boot sector, FATs, and root directory) in a place with a bad block.
HDX should have done this, but didn't.

============================================
Opinions expressed above do not necessarily	-- Allan Pratt, Atari Corp.
reflect those of Atari Corp. or anyone else.	  ...ames!atari!apratt