From: Irene A. Shilikhina (irene@alpha.iae.nsk.su)
Date: Wed Oct 22 2003 - 00:07:35 EDT
Yesterday I wrote I had a spare SCSI disk with one (known through scu
verify media) bad block which I'd like to use anyway. I asked what I'd
have to do to exclude the bad block from further using and to explain
what exactly mbad and reassign scu commands do (I found available scu
information not sufficient for me).
My thanks go to (in the order of arrival):
Uwe Lienig from Germany,
Olle Eriksson from Sweden,
Thomas Blinn, Roberto Romani, Alan Rollow, these three of HP.
The reply by Thomas Blinn contains the essence of what I have to do in
this case:
If the block is consistently bad and there is no useful data on the
disk that you need to save, then just use the scu low-level "format"
command to have the disk's firmware reformat the disk. It will not
use the block as available for data. It's that simple. You don't
have to map out the block manually.
Uwe Lienig suggests calling
scu> format defects all
Roberto Romani explains:
reassign will move a bad block to the defect list on the disk
[my comment: manually].
If scu fails trying to reassign the lba then perhaps the disk is
going bad.
Olle Eriksson says /sbin/mbad has nothing to do with scu and Roberto
Romani adds that it is used as a diagnostic tool.
Alan Rollow, in addition to explanation of reassign command, says:
Look through the paper documentation to see if it still
has a "Reader's Comments" page. That will have an email
address where you can make documentation suggestions.
My original mail is under the signature.
Thank you all very much again,
Irene
*************************************************************************
* *
* Irene A. Shilikhina e-mail: irene@alpha.iae.nsk.su *
* System administrator, *
* Institute of Automation & Electrometry, *
* Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, *
* Novosibirsk, Russia *
* http://www.iae.nsk.su/~irene *
*************************************************************************
* *
* The road to hell is paved with good intentions. *
* *
*************************************************************************
On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Irene A. Shilikhina wrote:
>
> The information in man page and help is not sufficient for me to find
> an adequate answer to my questions.
>
> There is a SCSI disk in my disposition of 4.29GB I'd like to use, which
> has (the only) one bad block (I know the number due to scu verifying,
> and this number is stable). My intension is to declare somehow this block
> as bad to bypass it in assigning blocks in formatting (I thought it was
> possible to do. Am I wrong?). I can see two commands in scu: mbad and
> reassign, but now I don't think I understand them correctly since their
> explanation is very short.
>
> Can you please explain to me WHAT EXACTLY these commands do [perhaps not
> what I'm expecting of them :-( ] and what I should do, if at all possible,
> to achieve my goal. And what should I have in the file /sbin/mbad.dat?
>
> Thanks in advance, even for pointing me to some source of comprehensible
> information,
>
> Irene
>
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