I've come by a secondhand ide drive, and replaced my real second drive,
having the good intention of copying my root partition onto it and
donating it to a friend who doesn't have any spare disk space on his
hard drive.  At first it seemed all well, disk formated ok under DOS,
and I could dd the whole partition without errors under linux. 

But when I came to put a file system on the drive, mkfs -c found 9 bad
blocks (on an IDE drive!?). Then with cp -Rp I got loads of

controller_ready: status = ff

The resultant filesytem after the copy was a complete mess (/etc/utmp was
a directory and that was one of the better points).  Could this just be 
because the disk is old (it came out of a 286 Compaq portable and is a
20M conner, my machine is a 33c 486).  If I up retries variable in the 
controller_ready() of blk_dev.c function is it possible the problems 
will go away??? or is the disk just flaking?

Thanks,
        Jon.  <jon@robots.ox.ac.ox.uk>