Emulex SC 7003, Ultrix 3.0, Emulex TC11, VAX 8650, & Ultrix v2.2

[Antti Louko]

In article <6424 at cbmvax.UUCP> grr at cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins) writes:
>We have CDC service here, and they service both Emulex and the CDC
>drives, though anything but VMS seems to be black magic to them.  They
>were very helpful in resolving problems I had with a bad adapter board
>and screwed up cables.  They also had the Emulex formatter package, but
>for some reason although it claimed to have formatted the drive, it
>didn't write out the bad sector file correctly.  Probably operator error,
>but it didn't show up immediately and I only realized things were screwed
>proper only after laying committing  my news spool to the minefield of
>bad spots.  Ouch.

A couple of years ago, we had similar experience with an
Emulex-controller emulating MASSBUS-adapter. Support engineer told us
that there are two bad sector files. DEC-MASSBUS-formatters write a
so-called factory bad sector file. Users can add later more bad
sectors into the user bad sector file. Emulex diagnostics seems to put
bad sectors only into the user bad sector file. BSD (and apparently
Ultrix, too) read only the factory bad sector file. I would be very
surprised if VMS doesn't read both of them. Could someone with
VMS-microfiches check this, please. I remember the user bad sector
file was at the start of the next track or cylinder or something like
that. I hope this helps.