[rescue] Another Reason Windows Sucks

[Kris Kirby]

On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, James Sharp wrote:
> I thought all the whiz-bang IDE drives in the laptops these days did that
> automagically.  Once you started getting bad sectors reported to the OS,
> then it was time to throw the disk out.

There's a thread on freebsd-hackers right now that went on detailing that
a new technique for cramming more bits onto the platter is reading the
whole track and writing it back and changing the relavent parts. This
means that there is no fixed sectoring system and the new track lies
`approximately' on top of the old one.

Guess what happens if you loose power during a disk write? You literally
loose sectors that cannot be recovered because ATA got rid of the FORMAT
op-code. The bad part is that some of the new SCSI drives are implementing
the `feature'.

--
Kris Kirby, KE4AHR          | TGIFreeBSD... 'Nuff said.
<kris at nospam.catonic.net>   | IM: KrisBSD | HSV, AL.
-------------------------------------------------------
"Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony."