CycoDreamer Posted May 5, 2004 Report Share Posted May 5, 2004 Hi all, I'm trying the Mandrake (10) installation for the first time since a couple of years and a lot has changed (for the better that is!) I'm used to a lot of other OSes, but I wanted to get rid of Windows as my servers. So I thought I'd install Mandrake. Here's my problem: I got a few external firewire drives, which have been working great over the years (media-storage and backups, etc). But now, when I try to mount them under Mandrake, it refuses to mount them. It told me that the filesystem was too corrupt to handle (but windows had no problem; just simple NTFS). The next thing I tried was removing all the partitions and let Linux repartition the raw disks. It didn't work either, because now it tells me that the partition-table can't be written to disk. Why does it do this? Anyone else having the same problems with external firewire drives? Do I have to do some patching? Try another version of Mandrake? I'm out of options right now... Please help me :unsure: greetings, Cyc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted May 5, 2004 Report Share Posted May 5, 2004 (edited) Hoi Tim, :) what command did you try to mount the drive? Just guessing I'd say that your firewire drives should show up as scsi devices (/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 or whichever - could also get linked through /dev/sda1 or so) you'd have to mount them read-only, with an indication that it is NTFS... As root: mount -t ntfs -r /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /mnt/fwdrive where you must of course have a dir /mnt/fwdrive (substitute for whatever you want). man mount for more info, or if you're reading this with Konqueror (the little program that could...), you may try clicking this link. Darn! Can only put http links as URL, not man://mount(8) which is what it should be for konqueror... Hmm, board request!! Edited May 5, 2004 by aRTee Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CycoDreamer Posted May 5, 2004 Author Report Share Posted May 5, 2004 (edited) Thx, Okay... I think I was a little fuzzy in my previous post (but hey... I'm a windows user...what would you expect ) I'll try to be more clear now. Here's what I did: I had 3 external firewire disks with NTFS partitions on them. When I hooked them up with my newly installed mandrake linux 10 machine, it found the devices and named them as SCSI devices (as you mentioned above) /dev/sda1 .... etc When I tried to mount them (tried it in several ways: manually, diskdrake and two other options I read about on the net...) it tried to scan for partitions on the devices (which took several annoying minutes). Then it came up with the message that the partitions were 'too much damaged to be recognized' and then it would tell me that there were NO partitions at all (so actually telling me that the disks were raw). It knew what the disksize was, so it was correct at some points :P After trying this for a couple of times I tried a different approach. I back-upped one of the drives and UNformatted it with windows (removed the partitions). I hooked it up with linux again. It still saw the device and it still took ages to scan the device. Again it came up with the message that the partitions were unreadable. So now I tried to let Linux have its way and do a format of the drive with a newly created extended partition. When I order it to format it tells me that the 'partition table' can't be written to the drive. The drives are all Maxtor 5000dv drives and linux recognizes them as such... and they are mentioned in the HCL: http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/showcat.php?cat=396 I hope this clears things a bit... greetz and thanx again :D Edited May 5, 2004 by CycoDreamer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzatch Posted May 6, 2004 Report Share Posted May 6, 2004 Have you tried formatting one as FAT32 just to see if it will work in both systems? What happens if you let linux partition amd format the drive? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CycoDreamer Posted May 6, 2004 Author Report Share Posted May 6, 2004 (edited) Have you tried formatting one as FAT32 just to see if it will work in both systems? What happens if you let linux partition amd format the drive? No, I didn't try the FAT32 format-part. Does Linux handle FAT32 better than NTFS? Yes, I tried to format the drive with linux, but it won't let me. It tells me it 'can't write the partitiontable' greetz Edited May 6, 2004 by CycoDreamer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted May 6, 2004 Report Share Posted May 6, 2004 Have you tried formatting one as FAT32 just to see if it will work in both systems? What happens if you let linux partition amd format the drive? No, I didn't try the FAT32 format-part. Does Linux handle FAT32 better than NTFS? Yes, I tried to format the drive with linux, but it won't let me. It tells me it 'can't write the partitiontable' greetz Linux has READ ONLY support for NTFS. It has limited and suicidal NTFS write support that isnt worth mentioning. Try updating your kernel to the 2.6 series, Linux's firewire support has improved vastly. iphitus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted May 6, 2004 Report Share Posted May 6, 2004 He's using Mdk10, so already running a 2.6 kernel. And indeed, NTFS and linux is just not a good team... So try to format with fat32 (or hey, ext3 or other journalised linux) partitions, and it should be ok. Diskdrake should be able to do that; report back what you try/do and if it works or not.. In any case, you surely still have a windows machine around that can also do the partitioning of the now empty drive(s) - just make them fat32 in that case, not ntfs. Then it should be no problem to use them. One more important hint: it might be better to mount by hand, or better, with an fstab entry, not with the builtin automagical supermount mechanism - for usb2 in any case I found that the speed is like usb1.1 when reading (not writing) data - may be functioning well with FW - better protocol and all. For more on this usb and mounting by hand, see my site (articles on mdk9.2 and 10.0 for instance).... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CycoDreamer Posted May 6, 2004 Author Report Share Posted May 6, 2004 (edited) Now I'm realy puzzled.... I already tried to format the drive as a linux native partition type (I tried almost any type in the list, including XFS and stuff :lol: ) It keeps telling me that the partitiontable can't be written to disk.... It looks like it's a physical damaged drive (It acts like that anyway). But it is definately NOT a damaged drive. I hate to say it, but windows and even mac OS 9 and 10 have no problem with this drive.... I appreciate all your help, Is there any more forcible way of formatting drives in Linux than the ones offered by the standard mandrake interface. My linux-knowledge is kinda outdated and very limited :D I'm still having fun though....hehehehe (even though my girl-friend doesn't have a clue why I spend all this time on a machine which doesn't want to work'the way I want it to ) can I supply any more info or logfiles or something to help you guyz helping me? In the meanwhile, I'm gonna try to format it FAT32 (YIHAA ) Edited May 6, 2004 by CycoDreamer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted May 6, 2004 Report Share Posted May 6, 2004 You may want to read the manpages on mkfs and its related commands: man mkfs You'll want to use at least the -v flag to get verbose output.. Since the drive is empty, there is little risk in messing with the numbers/options/flags... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted May 7, 2004 Report Share Posted May 7, 2004 Or try updating your kernel!!! There is huge improvements in the firewire support. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted May 7, 2004 Report Share Posted May 7, 2004 iphitus, has the fw support changed so much since kernel 2.6.3-7mdk which is the standard one in OE? If not, then updating the kernel will not help out in this case... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CycoDreamer Posted May 7, 2004 Author Report Share Posted May 7, 2004 (edited) Hello all, Well... here's an update: I tried the FAT32-way...and failed also.. I tried the mkfs-way, but it says that there is NO device called /dev/sda.... Then I found this site: http://www.linux1394.org I tried several things mentioned on this site. When I try the 'modprobe' stuff mentioned on that site and look at the logfiles, I see a lot of lines which tell me that there are errors involving the sbp2-driver. And also block 0 errors of the sda device. This should imply that there is a physical damage, or not? If this is the case, how can I bypass this problem in linux? Since I am used to OSes which do that automatically for me B) I still think it's weird that Linux detects errors on all 3 drives and windows and macOS have never even mentioned them... But I guess that's life :D greetz, Cyc Edited May 7, 2004 by CycoDreamer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest fry26 Posted June 1, 2004 Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 just out of couriosity: do you have a Lucent Firewire Card? I have a FW323 here and I get corrupted data back from my harddisk. I got "unknown partition table" messages in the syslog so I tried to track down the problem. The problem seems to be that the data read by the ieee1394 subsystem are corrupted so the kernel is unable to read the geometry information from the drive (and starts to guess - which fails). Regards Michael Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest fry26 Posted June 1, 2004 Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 just out of couriosity: do you have a Lucent Firewire Card? I have a FW323 here and I get corrupted data back from my harddisk. I got "unknown partition table" messages in the syslog so I tried to track down the problem. The problem seems to be that the data read by the ieee1394 subsystem are corrupted so the kernel is unable to read the geometry information from the drive (and starts to guess - which fails). Regards Michael Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CycoDreamer Posted June 1, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 just out of couriosity: do you have a Lucent Firewire Card? I have a FW323 here and I get corrupted data back from my harddisk. I got "unknown partition table" messages in the syslog so I tried to track down the problem. The problem seems to be that the data read by the ieee1394 subsystem are corrupted so the kernel is unable to read the geometry information from the drive (and starts to guess - which fails). Regards Michael Hmmm... Sounds a lot like my problem indeed. I must admit I don't really know the build of my FW-card... I thought it is a standard TI... How did you resolve the problem? I'm curious... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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