On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 7:26 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com>
wrote:
On Wednesday, 7 November 2018 at 10:14:20 -0500, Clem
Cole wrote:
On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 9:09 AM
<ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
The DEC drivers just left off the last 72
sectors. There was no
provision using them for block replacement.
Minor update -- *no dynamic replacement provision*. There was a
standard alone utility called BAD144 that implemented DEC Standard
144 (Bad Blocks).
Yes, this was also present in early FreeBSD distributions. I have a
vague recollection that people warned against using it.
It was OK for the super-duper old IDE drives from the IBM/AT and 80386 era.
It was better for the ESDI drives because those tended to ship with a list
of bad blocks printed on the label (which was itself a carry over from the
MFM days). The MFM drives *did* have a DEC standard to list bad blocks and
reserve spare cylinders which was derived from the earlier rkXX drives.
bad144 was for the rkXX drives and then adopted, badly, for the newer
drives types and wasn't super-great by the time FreeBSD came along...
Warner