On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 15:44 -0800, Hugh E Cruickshank wrote:

From: Scott Silva Sent: December 5, 2007 15:09

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on 12/5/2007 12:13 PM Hugh E Cruickshank spake the following:

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Don't most modern drives cover up the bad blocks with controller logic and spare block substitutions?

All SCSI drives do this but what I am trying to do is display the contents of this "bad block" table. I have some suspect drives that had errors report but format fine at the controller level. I would like to see how many bad blocks the format encountered and remapped. If there are a large number of these then I do not want to use the drives in any critical applications. If the number is small then I will assume that the drive is basically fine to use and that the errors were localized.

Since I posted my original inquiry I have discovered that some of the drive manufacturers have T&D utilities that might allow me to get at this information. The main problem here is that they tend to be Windows based which means that I will need to setup a Windows system just to test the drives. I would rather test them in the systems that the will be running in (one is CentOS 4.5 and one is RHEL3). Seagate does have an older utility that supposedly will run at the Linux CLI (their terminology) which I will be trying out.

Regards, Hugh

IIRC, most of those diags that say they require "Windows" really run under DOS (6.x or 7.x). I keep a couple of the DR DOS (free) diskettes (and diskette drives) around for this and BIOS upgrades, which also often say "Windows" is needed.

That might work for you, as far as getting the tables of interest.

HTH -- Bill

On Fri, 2007-12-21 at 14:02 +0200, Alexandru Chiscan wrote:

Hugh E Cruickshank wrote:

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Hi All:

Is there a utility available that will allow for the dump/display of the bad track table of a SCSI drive. We had this capability on SCO OSR5 but I have not been able to locate anything similar for Linux. The closest I have found is the badblocks utility that is part of the e2fsprogs package but this appears to only test for bad blocks not display the current bad block table contents.

I have done quite a bit of searching with Google but either it does not exist or (more than likely) I am using the wrong search parameters.

TIA

Regards, Hugh

Hello,

If you are looking for the table which badblocks builds then you should use dumpe2fs (for ext2/3 filesystem). man dumpe2fs DUMPE2FS(8) DUMPE2FS(8) NAME dumpe2fs - dump ext2/ext3 filesystem information SYNOPSIS dumpe2fs [ -bfhixV ] [ -ob superblock ] [ -oB blocksize ] device DESCRIPTION dumpe2fs prints the super block and blocks group information for the filesystem present on device. dumpe2fs is similar to Berkeley’s dumpfs program for the BSD Fast File System. OPTIONS -b print the blocks which are reserved as bad in the filesystem.

I doubt that will work. Most drives now (and SCSI even longer) have automatically remapped bad blocks so the fs manager never sees them. Utilities from the manufacturer are usually needed to do this. Search the list for threads (recent) related to this for more discussion.

Regards, Lec

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