Nathan Moore wrote:
Hi,I've been fighting with a series of Western Digital disks for the last few weeks. The general problem is that after allocating the disk as one large partition, formatting the partition fails. The specific failure is as follows: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006) Filesystem label= OS type: Linux Block size=4096 (log=2) Fragment size=4096 (log=2) 61063168 inodes, 122096000 blocks 6104800 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user First data block=0 Maximum filesystem blocks=0 3727 block groups 32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group 16384 inodes per group Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968, 102400000 Writing inode tables: 445/3727 Although there is no error message, the mkfs command freezes up the machine, and nothing further can be done on the system without cycling the power. I've tried running WD's diagnostic on the disks, and this sometimes turns up a problem. These are the 2'nd RMA'ed pair of drives that I've gotten from WD though - the problem is persistent across multiple drives - it seems weird that the replacement drives also have the same problem when being formatted. Are there implicit limits in mkfs about how big the partition can be? Any other ideas about why the drive would refuse to properly format? A few technical notes: The drives are ~500GB IDE drives, Western Digital 500GB, 7200RMPM IDE UltraATA100 The system is running SL5.0, i386 Motherboard is ABit NF-95 Machine has 2 other hard disks on the SATA bus.
Seems to me worth trying another brand, maybe Seagate or Hitachi, my current favourites.
-- Cheers John -- spambait [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Advice http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375 You cannot reply off-list:-)
