In article <20050530172721.GA948@aragorn.net-tex.de>,
Stefan Schumacher  <stefan@net-tex.de> wrote:
>-=-=-=-=-=-
>
>Also sprach Steven M. Bellovin (smb@cs.columbia.edu)
>> I have a disk with enough unreadable portions that it's being replaced 
>> under warranty by the vendor.  I would like to overwrite whatever 
>> portions of the disk I can.  Trying to do that in a straight-forward 
>> fashion runs afoul of the error recovery code; it slows down the 
>> attempt or even prevents it.  Any suggestions on what to do?  (This is 
>> an SATA disk on -current/i386.)
>
>If you know which sectors are FUBARed you could build slices around
>them and wipe that working slices with a wiper or dd.
>
>Some HDs also come with a vendormade software that disables defunc
>blocks, maybe this would be a way. 

I think for this kind of application we can add an ioctl that sets the
retry count at the driver level to 0.

christos