Patrick Schaefer wrote:
Michael J. Mahon schrieb:I know there is the spare block table issue, so it could be that I ran out of them and a reformatting could recover some of them.If that's the problem, can't an application scan the blocks and put the bad ones into a "file" that is kept locked? In other words, can't this problem be handled above the formatting level?That's not possible because the Profile performs a selftest during startup where each block is checked.
Yes, after I wrote that, I realized that the higher-level recovery isn't possible if the low-level scan at power on never completes. ;-( It does, however, suggest that if the surface scan could be forced to exit during initialization, then an application could take the bad sectors out of the available space pool. (Still not much help for in-use sectors that fail.) -michael Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it is seriously underused."