On Fri, 30 Nov 2018, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > I found the bad spot and put a SECTORS.BAD file there, and then was OK. > The Microsoft Beta program wanted cheerleaders, and ABSOLUTELY didn't want any > negative feedback nor bug reports, and insisted that the OS had no > responsibility to recover from nor survive hardware problems, and that > therefore it was not their problem. I told them that they would soon have to > do a recall (THAT was EXACTLY what happened with DOS 6.2x). They did not > invite me to participate in any more Betas.
Well, ATA drives at that time should have already had the capability to remap bad blocks or whole tracks transparently in the firmware, although obviously it took some time for the industry to notice that and catch up with support for the relevant protocol requests in the software tools. It took many years after all for PC BIOS vendors to notice that ATA drives generally do report their C/H/S geometry supported (be it real or simulated; I only ever came across one early ATA HDD whose C/H/S geometry was real, all the rest were ZBR), so there is no need for the user to enter it manually for a hard drive to work. 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. > 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. Maciej