sp4rc writes:
[snip]
> 
> so one can assume the harddisk is damaged, but if i disklabel sd6 and
> set the a partition to fstype 4.2BSD and then create a newfs (newfs -O 1
> /dev/sd6a) on it, a fsck -fy /dev/sd6a doesn't show up any kind of
> error. So what's going on here ?! 

newfs doesn't touch all the blocks on a disk.  And in your case, it's
not touching the part of the disk that's having problems.

Try something like this:

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd6a bs=1m seek=1

to do the testing.  It should generate the same error that you saw
with 'raidctl -v -i'.

Later...

Greg Oster