30 Nov
2018
30 Nov
'18
7:44 p.m.
> I found the bad spot and put a SECTORS.BAD file
there, and then was OK.
On Sat, 1 Dec 2018, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
Well, ATA drives at that time should have already had
the capability to
remap bad blocks or whole tracks transparently in the firmware, although
Not even IDE.
Seagate ST4096 (ST506/412 MFM) 80MB formatted, which was still
considered good size by those of us who weren't wealthy.
Of course the ability to remap bad storage areas
transparently is not an
excuse for the OS not to handle them gracefully, it was not that time yet
back then when a hard drive with a bad block or a dozen was considered
broken like it usually is nowadays.
Yes, they still came with list of known bad blocks. Usually taped to the
drive. THIS one wasn't on the manufacturer's list, and neither SpeedStor
nor SpinRite could find it!
There were other ways to lock out a block besides filling it with a
garbage file, but that was easiest.
And, I did try to tell the Microsoft people that the OS "should recover
gracefully from hardware errors". In those words.
I had a font
editor that wouldn't tolerate 3.1, and quite a few XTs (no A20),
so I continued to keep Win 3.0 on a bunch of machines.
Did 3.1 support running in
the real mode though (as opposed to switching
to the real mode for DOS tasks only)? I honestly do not remember anymore,
and ISTR it was removed at one point. I am sure 3.0 did.