Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!gatech!mcnc!decvax!mandrill!edguer
From: edguer@mandrill (Apostle of Zeus)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Help me before I die again.
Message-ID: <2390@mandrill.CWRU.Edu>
Date: 24 Mar 88 03:06:17 GMT
Sender: edguer@mandrill.CWRU.Edu
Reply-To: edguer@mandrill (Apostle of Zeus)
Organization: CWRU Dept of Computer Engineering and Science
Lines: 62
Keywords: HELP bad144
Summary: How do you mark a sector as bad


===
The background information
---
Hardware: VAX 11/750, CS21, CDC9762	OS: BSD 4.3
This evening my computer crashed with the error:
	up2c: freeing free inode
The syslog shows that this occurred after a repeated set of errors:
	up2c: hard error sn38696 cn=241 tn=4 sn=9
Upon rebooting, I ran a file system check.  It failed (of course) with:
	can not read: blk 38696
Which of course lead me to post this message since according to
	SMM15-11 "This should never happen.  See a guru."
====
The Problem:
---
I decided to mark the sector as bad using bad144(8).  
	bad144 rm03 up2
returned a two page list - 126 entries.  The entries were not in
order, and of course there is only room for 126 entries in the bad
sector list.  Two strikes.
From speaking with Keith Bostick, it would appear that something
overwrote the bad sector table.  So I decided to simply create a new
one.
According to the bad144(8)
	"The -f option may be used to mark the new bad sectors as 'bad'"
So I tried
	bad144 -f rm03 up2 1752457552 38696
It didn't work.  Instead I received the error message:
	ioctl: no such device
Hrumph.  I tried to create the bad sector table without the -f.
	bad144 rm03 up2 1752457552 38696
This worked fine - the bad sector was written out to sectors
	131648, 131650, 131652, 131654, 131656
However, when I reran fsck /dev/up2c I continued to get 
	can not read: blk 38696
and
	up2c: hard error ....
After rereading the manual page I saw
	"Note, however, that bad144 does not arrange for the specified
	 sectors to be marked bad in this case."
I thought simply rebooting the computer would force the system to
reread the bad sector table and mark the sector as bad.
	NOPE
I double checked the table and 38696 was still in the table.
SO, HOW DO I MARK A SECTOR BAD ??????   I cannot find anything to help me.
===
Second question
---
Since bad144 wasn't helping me I thought I would try using badsect so...
	mount up2c /usr2
	mkdir /usr2/BAD
	cd /usr2
	badsect /usr2/BAD 38696
Instead of solving my problem I got back an error message
	block 38696 in non-data area: cannot attach
Any ideas on what that means?
===
My eventual solution was to reformat the disk.

Thanks,
Aydin Edguer			!{cbosdg,decvax,sun}!mandrill!edguer