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Date:      Fri, 30 Mar 2001 08:46:51 -0800
From:      Hal Weaver <hweaver@pinetel.com>
To:        Matthew Emmerton <matt@gsicomp.on.ca>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Slow, noisey hard drive activity
Message-ID:  <3AC4B87B.A2FCB938@pinetel.com>
References:  <3AC3A738.B73B0404@pinetel.com> <00d401c0b897$a88f25e0$0204a8c0@dfgh> <003501c0b89b$786a06b0$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca> <3AC3FC42.9931CB96@pinetel.com> <003401c0b8ce$886e7d10$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca>

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Matthew Emmerton wrote:
> 
> > Matt, I don't get the ticking or the sluggish access with FreeBSD on the
> > 1.2G hard drive where FreeBSD uses the whole drive.  Nor do these
> > symptoms occur on the 5G hard drive when I use the Win98 or the Native
> > Oberon operating systems, or when I had Slackware 7.1 or SuSE 6.3
> > installed on the *nix partition.  The problem seems unique to the
> > FreeBSD installation on the *nix partition.
> 
> Well, it could be that you've got a bad sector on the FreeBSD portion of the
> drive, which is causing the drive to reset and reread the bad sector.
> Depending on the drive mechanics, this could make a ticking sound as the
> heads park themselves (well, maybe not park in the 80s hard drive sense, but
> at least move off of the writeable surface) while the drive resets, and then
> seek back to the bad location.
> 
> I don't know if FreeBSD has any native tools to check for such errors and
> mark them (a la DOS's scandisk), and since I'm guessing that these drives
> are ATA, you can't use the controllers' "scan media for defects" option like
> you can for SCSI drives.

Matt, this sounds quite possible.  This is an ATA drive.  Do you have a
hypothesis why the two Linux distribution that I installed on this
partition didn't seem to be affected by a bad sector?

Thanks.

Hal



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