On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 11:07:13AM -0400, Jason Thorpe wrote: > > > On May 31, 2026, at 10:21???AM, Thor Lancelot Simon <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Means moving a drive physically from a DEC system to a Sun VME system > > would have lost the bad block table, right? I remember seeing exactly > > that done a few times with CDC drives that went from VAXen with Emulex > > controllers to Sun replacements which I expect had Xylogics controllers. > > I guess to do this safely must have required a low-level reformat by > > something that wrote the bad144 data in the expected byte order. > > Thinking about this a little more.. > > ???Of course.??? > > Because it???s not like UFS could handle either byte-order back then, either.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. But having to create new filesystems is a little different from having to do a full format in ignorance of which blocks were already marked as bad. In one of the two instances I remember personally, I believe the controller on the VAX was emulating an MSCP controller and thus would have had to internally manage bad blocks anyhow. I was pretty sure the other one was Massbus but I don't know what the controller was (I'm assuming some kind of Emulex, I don't think I ever saw any other generic SMD controller in a VAX) nor how it worked. -- Thor Lancelot Simon [email protected] "The liberties...lose much of their value whenever those who have greater private means are permitted to use their advantages to control the course of public debate." -John Rawls
