I am having trouble formatting a new hard drive. I have two 20GB drives, hda and hdb. Win98 is in the first partition on hda and the Mandrake 9.2 is in second partition with swap and /home on hdb. I also have a Promise Ultra133 TX2 PCI disk controller card that is connected to a new 80GB Maxtor disk drive. This controller and disk was installed before Mandrake, and it appeared to have been recognized and seems to be working fine. In the installation process I created a 20GB /home2 partition on this 80GB disk and I have put some data on this partition without any difficulty. These are all ext3 partitions.
I am now trying to create another ext3 partition on the rest of the disk using DiskDrake. I have moved all the data off of the /home2 partition, so there is nothing on the disk anymore, and I have deleted all the partitions and recreated them several times with many reboots. Sometimes creating the second partition in DiskDrake fails. DiskDrake gives no error message, but it does not give you the mount option. If I look in the syslog I see:
Other times the formatting and mount appear to work correctly, but when I reboot the file system check says hde5 is corrupt and wants to run fsck. When fsck runs, I get an error like: “Couldn’t find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks. e2fsck: bad magic number in superblock while trying to open /dev/hde5…” It suggest running e2fsck with a –b xxxx option to specify an alternate superblock, but that gives the same error.
If you run fdisk, it shows the 2 partitions on hde. I also have PartitionMagic 8.0 (PM) on the Win98 and if you run it, it only says there is one “bad” partition occupying the whole disk. It shows the ext3 partitions on the 2 other disks fine.
The only other error message I can find in the syslog files is:
DiskDrake seems to give this error at various times. All of these are directories on hda5. They are not mount points and they are not on hde.
Does anyone have any idea what the problem may be? Bad hard disk? Problem with the Promise disk controller? Software problem formatting large disks?
Any suggestions on how to track down the issue? I have been thinking of trying to format the disk with PM, either in windows or booted from PM cd, and see what happens. PM 8.0 is suppose to be able to create ext3 partitions, but I’m not sure they will work with Mandrake. I have also been thinking of trying to format the whole disk as fat32, and run the surface test in Win98. Any other suggestions?