> Uh, you never read wd177x data books in my youth?[1]
>
> Regards,
> -is
>
> [1] Apparently, before your youth ;-)

No I haven't spent too much time reading wd177x data books, although maybe I
should have ;)
I have found this in my searching :

------
> The wd driver misbehaves rather spectacular in the face of
> bad blocks. There are a number of problems.
>
> 1) The drive returns atapi error number 1 on some reads.
> According to the ATAv4 draft I was able to find, this indicates
> "obsolete". sys/dev/ata.c's atapi_errno() pritns a nulls string
> for this error, rather than anything useful. This results in:
>
>    wd0e:   reading fsbn ...
>
> which is confusing.  I've patched my kernel to report it as "(obsolete)"

Ok, I changed it to : "obsolete (was address mark not found)", to make
it clear.
-------

which clears things up a bit.

Stuart