Partitioning issue

[william]

After deciding the layout of my external (USB) 80GB harddrive, I used diskdrake to do the job of creating, formating and mouting the partitions. The layout is:

 
sdb1 - /mnt/windoze - 10GB - vfat 
sdb2 - /altroot - 10GB -ext3 
sdb3 - swap - 512MB  
sdb5 - /mnt/storage - the rest - ext3

Diskdrake took almost 3 hours to format sdb4!!

In my first boot I got some error messages like:

poseidon fsck: /dev/sdb2: 
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 
If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: 
e2fsck -b 8193 <device> 
poseidon fsck: /dev/sdb5: 
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 
If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock 
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: 
e2fsck -b 8193 <device> 
Apr 25 09:33:35 poseidon modprobe: FATAL: Module scsimon not found.

So the system asked me if I wanted to fix the problem, I opted for Y and the boot went ahead.

What's the issue here? when creating the partitions I set all as being primary instead of extended, is it correct? That message saying the scsi module was not found is part of /var/log/message, don't know if the problem is related to it. I can read and write to /mnt/storage and /mnt/windoze as root

Here is my fstab:

/dev/hda5 / ext3 noatime 1 1 
/dev/sdb2 /altroot ext3 noatime 1 2 
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0 
/dev/hda7 /home ext3 noatime 1 2 
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdc,fs=auto,--,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,noatime 0 0 
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0 
/dev/sdb5 /mnt/storage ext3 noatime 1 2 
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs nls=iso8859-1,ro,umask=0 0 0 
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/windoze vfat umask=0 0 0 
none /mnt/zip supermount dev=/dev/sda4,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,kudzu,codepage=850 0 0 
none /proc proc defaults 0 0 
none /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0 
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0 
/dev/sdb3 swap swap defaults 0 0

Thanks for the help or suggestions.

Edited April 25, 2004 by william

[william]

Am I the only who has experienced a situation like this?

Come on guys, give any clue or suggestion on how to get rid of this problem. The disk, despite of being formatted is empty and I could redo all the partitioning process again.

Thanks

[Cannonfodder]

What sdb4? All I see in your list is sdb5 which is an extended partition. Get rid of sd5, and make it sdb4 (primary) and you won't have any issues with windoze.. (don't believe so).

[william]

What sdb4? All I see in your list is sdb5 which is an extended partition. Get rid of sd5, and make it sdb4 (primary) and you won't have any issues with windoze.. (don't believe so).

It was a typo, actually it should have been sdb5. Ok, I will do what you suggested.

Thanks Cannonfodder.

[Cannonfodder]

Reason is that Linux can make a different type of extended partition. If everything is a primary (maximum of 4), then maybe your problem won't be there since windows understands primaries.