On Wed, 20 Jan 1999, Mason Loring Bliss wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 20, 1999 at 01:06:43PM -0600, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> 
> > A failing hard drive tends to truncate files like that. At least it
> > indicates the bad blocks are being replaced. Perhaps it's time to do a
> > low-level format?
> 
> Hm... It's a brand new Maxtor drive, and I've seen no other problems with it
> as yet. It's also my boot disk, and it would be difficult to low-level format
> it and get everything back to where it is now...
> 
> Is there any way I can check out its health non-destructively? It rarely
> sees problems while running fsck...

I understand there are utilities for that. You could also try "dd",
something like "dd if=/dev/wd0d of=/dev/null bs=8k". Trying to read a
block that's been replaced should print an error to the console.
Exactly what happens when you get a bad block, though, depends on the
firmware of the drive, and the settings in the scsi mode pages.

> Anyway, it seems somewhat odd that I'd see precisely the same problem each
> time through, especially given that I've nuked and rebuilt my source tree,
> and run sup in the interim. It would take some measure of luck for the file
> being used as source for the script in question to land on the same spot
> repeatedly.

I understood that you had two slightly different errors. In any case,
that file that was truncated in mid-line looked really familiar. I
built my X tree on a removable drive, and a couple of months later, I
noticed I had files truncated the same way, after "make World" gave
all kinds of wierd errors.

> I'm moving my current tree, and yet again supping from scratch. If I get the
> same error with both trees in the same spot, then we can rule out the health
> of my disks...

Sounds reasonable.