Problems with aic7880 (AGAIN)

[Doug Ledford]

On Mon, 30 Mar 1998, Mike Bilow wrote:

> 
> 
> Doug Ledford wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:
> 
>  DL> I would run the EZ-SCSI BIOS routine at startup (the CTRL-A
>  DL> message) and then select the SCSI Disk Utilities, then
>  DL> select Verify Media on the second hard disk.  If it doesn't
>  DL> pass this, then the disk needs a low level format to clear
>  DL> out bad sectors and that would be the most likely cause of
>  DL> your problems.
> 
> Actually, just running "Verify Media" will remap bad sectors if found.
> 
> I would also remind readers of the list that many drive manufacturers do not
> enable automatic remapping of sectors on write failure (AWRE).  You can check
> this with the "scsiinfo" utility.  With AWRE enabled, you should see something
> like this:

[ much snipped ]
Actually, you are correct that verify media should remap bad sectors if
the ARRE bit is set.  However, not to point at drive manufacturers, some
of the recent drive firmwares I've dealt with have essentially acted as
though the AWRE/ARRE bits are unset regardless of whether they are set or
not.  Furthermore, on those drives, if you ever do actually receive a
media error from the drive, then once it's made its way to the front where
you can see it, the drive will *never* remap that sector until a low level
format is done.  So in short, if all drives act like they are suppossed
to, then you are 100% correct in your email, but because of a few naughty
boys, I always go the safe route and recommend the low level format.

--------------------------------------
 Doug Ledford  <dledford at dialnet.net>
  Opinions expressed are my own, but
     they should be everybody's.
--------------------------------------



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