Bill Studenmund wrote:

>I at least am comfortable with this change as my experience with disks is
>that they work great for a while, and then they die hard. This experience
>is both from working with computers, and working in labs that had
>disk-drive technology projects. Thus talking about what happens when ONE
>disk block goes bad doesn't make a ton of sense; if one goes bad, chances
>are many will follow and probably will have by the time we notice. So
>while the one bad block case can happen, I find it unlikely, as staying in
>that state means no more block failures.
>  
>
We have different experiences, clearly.  In about six months I've had two
disks (both modern 60G IDE drivers) fail in such a way that a few blocks
were unreadable.  In both cases I managed to rescue most of what was on the
disk using a minimum number of programs from /bin.

    -- Lennart