Recently my system stability has suffered a blow due to my eCS boot
drive (HPFS) crapping out. I'm getting bad sectors which are eating
away at my system files, and making my boot drive a bit of a minefield
when it comes to writing new temporary files, directory structures, and
most notably my SWAPPER.DAT.

I really do not relish the idea of tossing the disk and reinstalling the
OS at this time (especially since it's a rather ancient IDE system, for
which it might actually be hard to replace the drive now), so I'd like
to mark off the bad sectors and use as much of the disk as is safe and
let it drift slowly into the night at its own pace.

Problem is, I can't seem to get into an environment where I can get a
lock on the drive. Certainly booting off of the drive won't allow me to
do it, as expected. But to my surprise, even booting my eCS CD didn't
result in letting me mark off the bad sectors.

I have a registered version of DFSEE 7 (latest 7.x build) which I know
is quite old (he's up to 9.x now), but it has a bad sector scan
function. I used "scan -w" and it identified the bad sectors, and even
let me save out the sector list. But it did not mark off the sectors on
the disk. Likewise I tried ANALYZE from Gammatech Utilities (which is a
PM app), and it was also able to identify some trouble spots, but didn't
update the list of bad sectors.

What kind of environment do I have to be booted from to allow for this?
Is there a way that I can forcibly unmount the hard drive if I've
booted off of the CD, so that an application like DFSEE can get a hard
lock on it?

--
[Reverse the parts of the e-mail address to reply.]

Marty wrote:

I hate to tell you, but marking bad sectors/cylinders is a loosing battle -
the whole drive is beginning to fail and it's a snowball effect once it
starts. Best suggestions I have is to check pricewatch.com for a
replacement. Around here, I can usually find used drives at used computer
shops or a true electronics junk shop. Those are a sometimes a crap shoot
but you can usually get a usable drive for next to nothing unless you need
a large capacity one. Sometimes, you can buy a whole used machine (no
monitor, keyboard, etc) for less than the cost of just a drive.

Just be careful - once you start this you need an exit strategy to get rid
of the pile of old stuff that just seems to grow and grow....

--
Will Honea
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 06:05:23 UTC in comp.os.os2.misc, Marty
<net@comcast.martyamodeo> wrote:

The hardware marks them as bad automatically and transparently assigns spare
sectors to replace them. Once they start being visible then the drive has run
out of spare sectors and only has days or weeks of life left. Replace it now,
don't wait. There's no shortage of ordinary IDE drives.

--
Trevor Hemsley, Brighton, UK
Trevor dot Hemsley at ntlworld dot com

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 06:05:23 UTC, Marty <net@comcast.martyamodeo> wrote:

Why not buy a new SATA drive and a SATA controller card, which are very
inexpensive?

--
Fred Blau
(Change "NOSPAM@" to "systematics@" in my e-mail address)

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 06:05:23 UTC, Marty <net@comcast.martyamodeo>
wrote:

I just bought a re-conditioned 160 Gb WD IDE drive from Newegg for
$30. The drive I replaced reached the point where it was not even
recognized by the BIOS. I would get a replacement installed and pick
up a copy of DFSee so that I could boot from the CD version and start
trying to rescue things before they go away.

--
Chuck McKinnis

Marty wrote:
I know that CAD handler's shell can unmount a filesystem, however I have
no idea currently whether it is included into the eCS CD boot image, at
least the latest one.

Other possible alternative would be to copy all the files from the disk
to other disk, and reformat the partition with the long format. That
should find/mark some bad sectors also. Then copy the system back.


--
Cheers,
Martin

UNDERSCOREmmiATcentrumDOTcz to email me

Marty schrieb:
See the thread 'How to make sectors bad' in comp.os.os2.setup.storage.

Hendrik

Will Honea wrote:
I'll check it out. I can also just junk the drive completely and make
greater use of the other physical drive in the system, but it's near its
capacity right now so I'd have to do some major housekeeping. The main
thing I wanted to avoid is the OS reinstallation. I've never done an
"XCOPY /H/O/T/S/E/R/V" and I'm not convinced that it will be a bootable
and directly translated environment. At a minimum, some drive letters
will change around and references will be dangling.

Sadly, my exit strategy might be replacing my OS/2 functionality with my
64-bit Linux system. But I'd like to keep it going as long as I can.
And I'm not at all interested in running a virtual PC on the Linux
system just to run OS/2.

--
[Reverse the parts of the e-mail address to reply.]

Trevor Hemsley wrote:
Yup... my mind is trapped a few decades ago on this where manually
marking the sectors was necessary, and bad sectors showed up at the
first sign of trouble, not after the drive is on its last legs. If IDE
drives are still plentiful and cheap then I guess I have nothing to
worry about.

--
[Reverse the parts of the e-mail address to reply.]

Fred Blau wrote:
I'd like to avoid going down this route if I can avoid it because I
don't want to make any configuration changes if I don't have to. An IDE
drive be would just plug and play without additional PCI resources,
updated drivers, etc. I'll see what I can find at my usual hardware stores.

--
[Reverse the parts of the e-mail address to reply.]

Chuck McKinnis wrote:
That sounds perfect! (And right in my price range too.) ;-)

I'll check out NewEgg. Always loved Egghead. Bought GalCiv and Watcom
C for OS/2 right off of their *shelves* there back in the day. They had
a nice display for it and everything. :-)

--
[Reverse the parts of the e-mail address to reply.]

MMI wrote:
I was thinking about doing this, but I wasn't sure if it would recover
the boot image correctly with just some flavor of "copy". But I think
Boot Manager looks for OS2LDR etc., *files*, not a specific disk
location, right? Been so long since I've installed that I've forgotten
most of that stuff.

Anyway, thanks for the thoughts everyone!

--
[Reverse the parts of the e-mail address to reply.]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 20:39:29 UTC in comp.os.os2.misc, Marty
<net@comcast.martyamodeo> wrote:

They are and if you have boot floppies/CD that work on that system and can plug
both new and old drives in at the same time then you can just define the same
partition structure on the new drive and XCOPY the entire lot over - or even
boot a linux rescue CD and dd the whole thing if the drives are the same size
(if they're not then you can still do this but you might have to play silly
beggars with the partition table afterwards to get all the space used).

--
Trevor Hemsley, Brighton, UK
Trevor dot Hemsley at ntlworld dot com

On Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:02:57 -0500, Trevor Hemsley
<Trevor.Hemsley@mytrousers.ntlworld.com> wrote:

You just use the bootable eCS CD. As long as you have LVM, it's a doddle.
Just partition the new drive and define a volume using a spare drive letter.
Format it so the filesystems match and then XCOPY the whole drive to the new
disk. After that hide the volume on the old disk and reassign the original
drive letter to the volume you just copied on the new one. Repeat for all
other volumes.
When you are happy that everything's gone OK, you can then blitz everything
off the old disk using some tool or other e.g. Dfsee, and then remove the
old disk and send it to landfill.

I wouldn't bother using non-OS/2 tools when the native ones work so well.
I spent several happy(!) hours doing all this less than 2 weeks ago.

Hi Marty

Marty wrote:

I have lost count of the amount of drive changes that I have performed
on systems here over a number of years and *successfully* used

XCOPY partition1:\* partition2:\* /H /O /T /S /E /R /V

All you need to be able to do is make sure that the Partition/Volume
that you xcopy to ends up with exactly the same Drive Letter as the
Partition/Volume you xcopy'd from.

In the above example substitute G: for partition1: and L: for partition2:

When the disk containing partition1: (G is removed from the system
partition2: (L simply needs to be in the right place to become drive G:

I seem to recall that checking what drive letters would end up where was
the most difficult part of the job pre-LVM.

LVM makes the above task very easy - no need to even remove the original
disk; just change the drive letter from g: to something else and set the
new (destination) Volume to g: before even starting the xcopy. You also
need to have booted from CD to avoid any disk copying problems.

Obviously you also need to xcopy all other partitions/volumes to the new
disk to avoid "references will be dangling" if planning to remove the
original disk :-)


Regards

Pete

On Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:47:07 -0700, Marty <net@comcast.martyamodeo> wrote:

Bloody 'ell, this is not DOS or Windoze you know. The boot image is in the
OS2BOOT file, so as long as you've formatted the new volume with the same
filesystem as on the old one, you can just use XCOPY.
LVM is just brilliant when it comes to mucking with this stuff. I really
don't know why some people hate it. They must be brain dead. The concepts
are not exactly difficult...

Anyway, check out this thread for more details of how booting works:
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/com...5f56cec136c0ae
and also Bob Eager's pages:
http://www.tavi.co.uk/os2pages/

Marty wrote:

As long as the new partition or volume has the same drive letter as the old and the
same file system, XCOPY /h/o/t/s/e/r/v copies everything correctly and the partition
will boot provided the partition is marked bootable or startable.

If you change file system then after the XCOPY you have to run the correct version of
sysinstx.com.

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 22:36:31 UTC in comp.os.os2.misc, Paul Ratcliffe
<abuse@orac12.clara34.co56.uk78> wrote:

If the two drives are the same size then I'd just boot a linux rescue CD and use

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=65536

and walk away. When it's done, so is the job and you just remove the original
drive and recable. (/dev/hda and /dev/hdc assume master drives on each IDE
controller and dvice names may vary if not). No partitioning involved, no
multiple xcopying, one command and it's done.

--
Trevor Hemsley, Brighton, UK
Trevor dot Hemsley at ntlworld dot com

Hi Paul

Paul Ratcliffe wrote:

You can even xcopy from HPFS to BootableJFS.

Regards

Pete

On 06/04/08 07:05 pm James J. Weinkam wrote:


But note that I am not the only person who has found that XCOPY will
sometimes just quit in the course of copying a large (*how* large has
never been determined) number of files, complaining (after a long delay)
that it cannot access the source file.

I now use the 4OS2 enhanced COPY program or ZIP and UNZIP.

Perce