Should bad hardware cause a kernel panic?

[Nick Barnes]

At 2004-01-08 08:17:15+0000, Phil Kernick writes:

> I have a dying IDE hard drive that I want to try and recover some
> file from - the problem is that with it connected to my box, both
> FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE and 5.2-RC2 kernel panic.
> 
> This can be reliably duplicated by booting the machine with the drive not 
> connected, then plugging the drive in, and...
> 
> # atacontrol reinit 1
> panic!
> 
> The real problem with this is that I can't use any tools to try and
> recover any data.  The GEOM code in 5.x is slightly more resiliant
> than the 4.x code, but both cause panics.
> 
> On the other hand, it I boot a Knoppix Linux distro, it complains
> about the drive, but it *doesn't* panic, crash or otherwise
> misbehave.

Use Linux to dd the bits onto a clean drive, then try mounting that
drive on FreeBSD?

Nick B