checking for bad media

[George Georgalis]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 10:18:56PM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote:
>
>:Had some problems tonight with the 20040913 installer on via epia
>:CL10000 hardware. Is there known issues? Everything would work fine
>:until a little way into the cpdup phase, exactly the same place each
>:time, cd read errors came up, on my old cdrom, a new 656MB one and a new
>:burn on a 700Mb capacity cdrom. So I think it's not the media, the drive
>:is pretty new but I haven't changed it out yet. Has this board been
>:causing problems?
>:
>:
>:An unrelated issue, I've got some apparently failed disks. Is there
>:something akin to linux badblocks on the installer disk which will do a
>:read write test on the drive? I seem to recall a post about that not too
>:long ago, but I can't find it...
>:
>:// George
>:-- 
>:George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator Linux BSD IXOYE
>:http://galis.org/george/ cell:646-331-2027 mailto:george at xxxxxxxxx
>
>    Maybe it's the hard disk you are installing to that is having the 
>    media problems instead of the CD.  That's the only thing I can think
>    of that would result in an error at the same place every time.  Usually
>    IDE driver problems, bad cables, and bad CD drives error out in a
>    different location each time.
>

The errors are with the cd device reads. I'm kinda stuck as far as
capturing the output, the installer won't work via ssh (with su or ssh
-l installer), stops near beginning, during setup. And I had bought
null modem cables to try a serial install, but all the forknibbler docs
(which I need) are unavailable atm, even by google cache...


>    When a modern HD goes bad the only real solution is to buy a new one.
>    It might be possible to salvage it by running the manufacturer's low
>    level formatting tool for the drive, assuming one is available.  (This
>    also means you'd probably have to load up windoz in order to run the
>    tool).
>

I wasn't looking to "get away with" a bad disk (via badsect), I just want
to verify some disks are good, or bad as the case may be, before I build
on them.

// George


-- 
George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator Linux BSD IXOYE
http://galis.org/george/ cell:646-331-2027 mailto:george at xxxxxxxxx