>> I guess I'm going to have to reformat... but when it comes down to
>> it seems newfs doesn't mark bad sectors on-the-fly, only at format
>> time. Sounds like a bad assumption to me...

>Well, the device is busy because its mounted. You should boot up into single
>user mode(-s when it asks for the kernel name) and then try and run badsect
>on it. It way work, I can't say I;ve tried it but its worth a go :)

	No .. if the filesystem is mounted, you can't access the block
device period. Only the fix to badsect (which is in post-1.2) which turns
around and accesses the character (raw) device for the hanky-panky part
will do it.

>Maybe
>someone wants to write a program to find bad sectors on drives and hides em
>(would be nice an useful, or if fsck did it)

	I have thought about it, since I own a total of three old cheap
drives with bad sectors and have done manual discoveries of bad sectors
using "dd skip=??" .. 

	Hmm.

Cheers,
Phil
--
Phillip F Knaack
Database Programmer, Information Development for Extension Audiences (IDEA)
Iowa State University Extension