Re: [TUHS] mkfs somewhere else?

Dave Horsfall: I also wrote a paper on a "bad block" system, where something like inum "-1" contained the list of bad sectors, but never saw it through. ==== During the file system change from V6 to V7, the i-number of the root changed from 1 to 2, and i-node 1 became unused. At least some versions of the documentation (I am too harried to look it up at the moment) claimed i-node 1 was reserved for holding bad blocks, to keep them out of the free list, but that the whole thing was unimplemented. I vaguely remember implementing that at some point: writing a tool to add named sectors to i-node 1. Other tools needed fixing too, though: dump, I think, still treated i-node 1 as an ordinary file, and tried to dump the contents of all the bad blocks, more or less defeating the purpose. I left all that behind when I moved to systems with MSCP disks, having written my own driver code that implemented DEC's intended port/class driver split, en passant learning how to inform the disk itself of a bad block so it would hide it from the host. I'd write more but I need to go down to the basement and look at one of my modern* 3TB SATA disks, which is misbehaving even though modern disks are supposed to be so much better ... Norman Wilson Toronto ON * Not packaged in brass-bound leather like we had in the old days. You can't get the wood, you know.