The need for initialising disks before use?

[Brooks Davis]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 03:35:14AM -1000, Antony Mawer wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> A quick question - is it recommended to initialise disks before using 
> them to allow the disks to map out any "bad spots" early on? I've seen 
> some "uninitialised" disks (ie. new disks, thrown into a machine, 
> newfs'd) start to show read errors within a few months of deployment, 
> which I thought one or two might seem okay, but on a number of machines 
> is more than a coincidence...
> 
> Is it recommended/required to do something like:
> 
>     dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=1m
> 
> before use to ensure the drive's sector remappings are all in place, 
> before then doing a newfs?
> 
> FWIW, I've been seeing this on more 6.0 systems that I would have 
> thought to be just chance...

This probably isn't a bad idea in general.  It might even be something
we should add to sysinstall.

-- Brooks
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