Re: BDI 2.18 install problem

[jmkasunich-at-ra.rockwell.com]

Ray wrote:

> This fired a few stale connections in my head.  There are
> a couple of others out of two or three hundred who have
> had hard drive problems during an install.  It seems that
> the default install formats and does some meager verify
> but does not really get down and check the hard drive for
> bad blocks.

> I believe that in these cases, you'd have to specify a
> manual partition and tick the box that says check for
> bad blocks.

Actually, I did exactly that the first time, which is probably
why it took 10 minutes to format.  All my other install
attempts were made using the default BDI, both to keep things
simple, and to speed it up.

It might have been OK during the first format and got worse
later.  It was definitely getting worse as time went on.  At
the end, I booted with a DOS floppy, planning to do a DOS
fdisk/format/scandisk.  At first, fdisk was slightly confused.
It wouldn't let me remove an extended partition because it
thought there were logical partitions in it, but when I tried
to remove the logical partitions, it said there weren't any.
Later, fdisk refused to run at all, I assume the MBR must
have been truly trashed at that point.

The moral of the story - don't leave hard disks in the garage
over the winter.  Fortunately there was no important data on
it, and I have several spare disks in the 2-4G range.

I'll be bringing the computer (one of these:
http://www.allenbradley.com/industrialcomputers/rac6180.html )
to NAMES, hopefully we can use it to run something more
interesting than the simulator.


John Kasunich