Managing bad sectors during install

[Lowell Gilbert]

Pásztor Richárd <ricsip at mailbox.hu> writes:

> I have 2 small problems about installing FreeBSD.
> 1) My HDD is a 8,4 Gb quantum, which has 1 bad sector laying on it
> somewhere. I created ntfs partition
> on it, and format detected that sector, and marked as bad so there was
> no problem of data loss because writing
> to that sector. Now, if i fdisk the whole HDD to a freebsd slice, and
> divide it to partitions i get an error during
> filesystem creation, that a bad sector was detected. The system
> panics, and reboots after 15 sec.
> My question: why isnt the UFS able to mark this/these sectors as bad,
> and simply not to use them?
> Throwing panic for one single bad sector is not an elegant way.

See the entry in the FreeBSD FAQ titled "What do I do when I have bad
blocks on my hard drive?"  

The short answer, though, is that for years now, all drives can do
internal remapping of bad sectors.  The OS doesn't see any bad sectors
until the internal remapping tables are full, which means that *many*
sectors are bad, and disk failure is imminent.

> 2) My other smaller question: If i enabled SoftUpdates at install-time for "/"
> but changed my mind, how can i turn it off ? I cant unmount "/" to change it,
> because its always busy (the other partitions can be unmounted easily
> in single user)

You should be able to mount it read-only and change it then, no?

> I think these are basic problems, and should be (especially turning
> OFF softupdate on "/") mentioned in handbook also.

You can submit such changes as easily as anyone else...