> I don't believe that there is any bad block information in the BSD
> disklabel. On EDSI drives, bad block information is written by the
> manufacturer in cylinder 4095 (or cylinder 65535 if you're using
> extended addressing), but I'd gathered that the SCSI controller
> was supposed to compensate for this sort of thing automatically.

Well, since I couldn't use NetBSD to format the disk, I finally got a SunOS
boot tape and tried to use the "format" utility on that. Unfortunately, the
Emulex bridge board kept reporting errors when trying to write the defect
list. The reason, it appears, is an off-by-one error in the Sun formatting
software: it numbers the cylinders starting from zero, while Emulex and the
disk drive manufacturer number them from 1. Thus, the software tries to
write things to the wrong places and fails. It's also off by one cylinder
when it records the positions of defects during surface analysis.

In short, I don't have anything from NetBSD that will do the job, and the
Sun software is buggy, so I do not know if I can get this disk formatted.
And until I can, I can't write a replacement utility.

--Brett