I ran badblocks on a SCSI disk and found I have some, as I suspected
Because there is massing writing (and deleting) to this disk, I need to mark them so that I do not have freezes and crashes everytime I try to write to a bad block. Now the man pages only mention ext2 fs. Is there
a way I can mark these bad blocks so they are never accessed
with reiser, or should I reformat using ext2?

I know I should be changing the disk, but that is not possible right now

This page helped me out whit this problem

Note that you do need reiserfsprogs version 3.6.12-pre1 or newer.

(I know, it also says on top of the page, but i skipped over it when I was having this badblocks-problem.. Took me quite some time to figure out why it wasn't working.. stupid.. )

Ok, thanks, sounds like exactly what I need. So I need to first upgrade reiserfs, then
patch -p0 linux-2.4.22-badblocks.diff
then recompile the kernel, right?
Instead I may upgrade to 2.6.8. I assume I will not need patching then

If you really want to add the badblocks whit the filesystem mounted, than you need the patch.
But you can also unmount the filesystem, and then add the badblocks.(that's how I did it..) In the last case you don't need any kernelpatching.

Don't know whether this is standard in the newest kernel; you could try..

Thanks, I can umount the partition, but what commands do I need to permamently mark the bad blocks as such and avoid them ever being accessed?

First you should get a list of badblocks on your disk, whit
This saves all the badblocks on the disk in a file called 'badblockfile'

the default for reiserfs-block-size is 4k. If yours is 4k too (you haven't entered a blocksize when formatting) you should type 4096 here (=4*1024).

Then mark the badblocks as 'bad' of the filesystem whit:
Here badblocksfile is the output-file of badblocks

You should check the disk whit reiserfsck first to see if there aren't any other problems.

That should do the trick. Now they will atleast be unused until you format the drive again. When you format the disk again, you should do it whit a bad-blocks check.

good luck.

Need to upgrade reiser, sinc emy reiserfsck does not support badblocks(from slack 9.1)
Better yet, I'll upgrade everything.

Cannot get this to work... How do I format the disk?

You can (re)partition the disk whit fdisk or cfdisk, and then format it as reiserfs whit mkreiserfs .
check the manpages of these commands on how to use them.

But, If you want to upgrade anyways, you can also format the disk during slackware-setup..