I had things going OK, unpacking the source tarballs, when suddenly the
disk accesses nearly stopped.  The indicator light would come on and I'd
hear a couple of head movements, then the light would go off and nothing
happened for ten seconds or so, and repeat ad infinitum.

After I hit the reset button and it went to fsck the drive, it would go
merrily along for a while, then exhibit the same behavior.

I wondered if it might be some kind of disk geometry problem, though the
drive initially formatted properly.  So I booted the install floppy, mounted
up the hard disk, and was able to copy the snapshot tarballs and most of the
source tarballs onto my other system (saving the necessity of downloading
them again).  When it got part way through the xsrc tarball, the drive
started acting up again, so now I'm convinced it's a bad sector problem.

My question is:  What can I do to handle the problem?  (Please keep in mind
that I'm a newbie concerning PC options, experienced admin otherwise.)

Here's the specifics:

Gateway 486DX/33
Seagate ST32122A IDE

Error message when transferring xsrc:
soft error (corrected) reading fsbn 3164800 of 3099264-3099391 (wd0 bn 3456049;
cn 3428 tn 9 sn 58)

df output:
            512-blocks   used       avail
/dev/wd0a     120798     23170      91588
/dev/wd0e    3707782    999632    2522760

disk geom in BIOS: 4096 cyl., 16 hd., 63 sec.

pfdisk shows partition 4 as ID 165, first cyl 0, last cyl 1023, start
and length as 63,1032129 sectors

disklabel wd0 (slightly abbreviated):
sec/track: 63
track/cyl: 16
sec/cyl: 1008
total sec: 4124736
rpm: 3600

8 partitions:
#    size   offset    fstype  [fsize bsize cpg]
a:  124929      63    4.2BSD    1024  8192  16   # (Cyl. 0*-123*)
b:  166257  124992      swap                     # (Cyl. 124-288*)
c: 4124673      63    unused       0     0       # (Cyl. 0*-4091*)
d: 4124736       0    unused       0     0       # (Cyl. 0-4091)
e: 3833487  291429    4.2BSD    1024  8192  16   # (Cyl. 288*-4091*)

Thanks,
~Steve

-- 
Steve Allen - wormey@eskimo.com   http://www.eskimo.com/~wormey/   ICQ 6709819

Faith is the quality that enables you to eat blackberry jam on a picnic
without looking to see whether the seeds move.

Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly.  
It just happens to be selective about who it makes friends with.
	-Kyle Hearn  <kyle@intex.net>

Weiner's Law of Libraries:
	There are no answers, only cross references.