[CentOS] Re: SCSI bad block table display

William L. Maltby CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com
Fri Dec 7 22:56:19 UTC 2007


On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 15:44 -0800, Hugh E Cruickshank wrote:
> From: Scott Silva Sent: December 5, 2007 15:09
> > 
> > on 12/5/2007 12:13 PM Hugh E Cruickshank spake the following:
> > ><snip>

> > 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




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