[CentOS] Re: SCSI bad block table display

Ross S. W. Walker rwalker at medallion.com
Wed Dec 5 23:48:54 UTC 2007


Google 'sdparam'

-Ross


-----Original Message-----
From: centos-bounces at centos.org <centos-bounces at centos.org>
To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org>
Sent: Wed Dec 05 18:44:08 2007
Subject: RE: [CentOS] Re: SCSI bad block table display

From: Scott Silva Sent: December 5, 2007 15:09
> 
> on 12/5/2007 12:13 PM Hugh E Cruickshank spake the following:
> > 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
> > 
> 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

-- 
Hugh E Cruickshank, Forward Software, www.forward-software.com 
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