Gunnar Helliesen <gunnar@bitcon.no> writes:

> [bad sectors on SCSI disk]
> 
> How do I deal with this? Can I use the badsect(8) program or is that
> for DEC (MSCP) disks only?

You're supposed to be able to use the new scsictl(8) to make the drive
remap the bad blocks.  The data that was in them is lost, of course.

Here's how _not_ to deal with it, though: I've programmed all my SCSI
disks to remap automatically, using (IIRC) a DOS program from Seagate
called SCSICTL.EXE.  They will now automatically remap, and try their
best to save the data in the process, whenever more than one retry is
needed for access to a given data block.  At the same time, I set them
up to report all errors (including recovered errors, that is) to the
host system, so that I get syslog entries for retries.  This way, I
know ahead of time when something is getting shaky, and can make extra
certain I've got a fresh backup of the data in question.  (At work, we
backup every night, but at home it's more sporadic, and my disks are
older, so this feature is especially useful there.)

-tih
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