Disk woes on MVII / RD53

[Paul Riddle]

Hi everyone,

I've got a MicroVAX II here that was donated to our department.  It
has three RD53 disks, one of which seems to be sick.  Currently I'm
running Ultrix 3.0 on it (haven't gotten around to upgrading) and
every so often I get a "disk transfer error" logged to my syserr file.
I ran through it with the radisk utility and got a bunch of force
error modifiers set, and now it refuses to fsck, complaining that it
can't read these blocks.  I got around this earlier by newfs'ing the
disk, but the problem has returned.

Normally in this case we would just have field service come out and
replace the drive; however, this machine isn't covered by our service
contract, so I would like to see if I can salvage the disk.  Is there
any way I can do a low level format on an RD53 so it can find its bad
blocks?  This would seem like the best solution.  If it's not
possible, is there anything else I can do, or should I forget it?

Paul Riddle                         | paulr at umbc3.umbc.edu
Systems Programmer / Administrator  | ...!{uunet,haven}!umbc3!paulr
UMBC, Computer Science Department   |
Baltimore, MD 21228                 | (301) 455-3962