diskdrake formating troubles

[markht]

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:

 

Jan  4 22:53:40 myname diskdrake[3064]: running: mke2fs -F -j /dev/hde5

Jan  4 22:53:40 myname diskdrake[3064]: ERROR: ext3 formatting of hde5 failed

 

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:

 

Jan  5 00:22:53 myname diskdrake[3230]: ERROR: find_index failed in /boot /usr /var /var/ftp /var/www .

 

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?

[AussieJohn]

I had a similar problem. I too use a Promise Ultra66 in linux without difficulty normally. when I had the problem of not being able to use Partition Magic or the Linux Wizards to reformat or repartition the hard drive, I found the only way to resolve the difficulty was to use Windows because it uses the steamroller mentality. Partition Magic and Linux Wizards tend to go more the softly softly way.

 

Put in your Windows CDROM and pretend you are going to do an install. when you get to the part where you select the Partition to install, select the hard drive you want to fix as the hard drive of choice and go through the process of deleting its partitions and then select reformat.

When the reformat is complete then choose Escape button and abort the installation. Make sure you have your windows boot up floppy in so that as the computer reboots you can setup ready for the Partition Magic floppy. You should have no problem getting PM to read the "fixed" hard drive and partition it as you wish and format it in Linux format if that is your choice.

 

After all that, do a dummy up grade procedure of your Linux OS e.g. Mandrake 9.1 then do a 9.1 pretend upgrade. This way you get all the usual install detection and setting up without installing anything. Also if it detects that some bit of essential data is missing , it will add that data. When things get a bit screwed up from experimenting this is an excellent way to restore things back to running normal again.

 

Please let us know how you go . :D

 

Cheers for now. John (69yrs young)

[markht]

Thanks for replying. I will try something like this. I am not sure I can install Win98 on this disk using this PC, because Win98 needs a driver for this disk controller and the BIOS will not handle a disk this large, but I have a newer PC that can handle this disk without a controller, so I could swap the disk to that computer.

 

I also don't have a retail Win98 install CD. I only have the Dell system restore disk, which wipes the C drive clean and installs Win98 and a few Dell applications.

 

I will let you know what happens.

[markht]

I only had a couple of hours last night to work on this, which was not enough time to swap this hard drive to another computer where I could install WinXX on it in hopes of fixing any corrupt disk formatting, so I decided to try formatting the disk with PartitionMagic 8.0 (PM). I created approximately the same two ext3 partitions in PM running under Win98. I then booted back to Linux. DiskDrake saw the two partitions with no problem, and I was able to mount the partitions with no errors.

 

I copied some data onto each partition to test it and rebooted Linux a few times to make sure that the disk was not corrupt. Everything seemed to be fine.

 

I plan to do some more testing. I want to do a failsafe reboot and run e2fsk on it to make sure Mandrake thinks the file system is good.

 

The only thing I could see that was different in the way PM formatted the disk, is that it made the first partition a logical partition, even though I asked for a primary partition, so the disk is now formatted with two logical ext3 partitions. DiskDrake had made the first partition primary and the second logical. I think this should make no difference to Linux.

[iphitus]

I dont trust diskdrake, its too dodgy -- do the job yourself

 

[root@localhost]# mkfs.ext3 /dev/hde5

 

Other commands which are useful when manipulating partitions are:

fsck

fdisk

all the mkfs.*

cfdisk (urpmi it if oyu dont have it.. its better than fdisk)

 

Check the man pages

 

remember to edit your fstab so oyu can mount it

 

iphitus

Edited January 7, 2004 by iphitus

[markht]

I ran 'e2fsck -f ' on both partitions on the new hard drive, and they are clean, so everything looks good.

 

I used 'hdparm -Tt' to test the performance of all my disks. Here are the results:

 

/dev/hda5 – Western Digital 20GB, 7200 rpm, 2Meg cache, Mother Board controller

Timing buffer-cache reads: 372 MB in 2.00 seconds = 186.00 MB/sec

Timing buffered disk reads: 78 MB in 3.04 seconds = 25.66 MB/sec

 

/dev/hde5 – Maxtor 80GB, 7200 rpm, 8M cache, Promise Ultra 133 TX2 PCI controller

Timing buffer-cache reads: 492 MB in 2.00 seconds = 246.00 MB/sec

Timing buffered disk reads: 172 MB in 3.00 seconds = 57.33 MB/sec

 

This is in a Dell OptiPlex GX1 system with a 600 MHz Pentium III and a 33 MHz PCI bus. I am quit surprised that I can get disk I/O performance this high with this kind of a system.

 

Thanks to everyone for their advice.

Edited January 7, 2004 by markht