[ale] Drive/Filesystem problem...

[Cor van Dijk]

"Robert L. Harris" wrote:

> Hey all,
>   I have a friend setting up a dataware house and I convinced him to
> put it on a Linux box.  Right now it's not critical so we're just
> testing bandwidth, etc.  At any point, he has a 40 Gig drive in
> it and wants to keep it as a 40Gig disk, not a collection of 4s, etc...
> He is having some problems.  Here is the output he sent me:
>
> > EXT2-fs error (device ide1(22,1)): ext2_check_blocks_bitmap: Wrong free
> > blocks count for group 0, stored = 31727, counted = 31740
> > EXT2-fs error (device ide1(22,1)): ext2_check_blocks_bitmap: Wrong free
> > blocks count for group 53, stored = 31740, counted = 9202
> > EXT2-fs error (device ide1(22,1)): ext2_check_blocks_bitmap: Wrong free
> > blocks count in super block, stored = 9689889, counted = 9667364
> > EXT2-fs error (device ide1(22,1)): ext2_check_inodes_bitmap: Wrong free
> > inodes count in group 0, stored = 32693, counted = 32704
> > EXT2-fs error (device ide1(22,1)): ext2_check_inodes_bitmap: Wrong free
> > inodes count in super block, stored = 10007413, counted = 10007424
> >
> > Those are my main errors.  I get a lot of inode errors also.  And a ton of
> > errors if I do an fsck.
> >
> > The physical geometry of the drive is 16383,16,63, which is what ever drive
> > 18gig is set to.
> >
> > The LBA geometry of the drive is 4982,255,63.  I calculated this myself.
> >
> > The computer is a PII-233 not overclocked using a tekram P6L40-A4 or
> > P6L40-A4X Motherboard.  I know there are bios upgrades for this motherboard,
> > but I don't know if they fix this problem.
> >
> > The harddrive is a 40gig maxtor model 94098U8.
> >
> > It partitions, and formats fine, but then after the format if I try to mount
> > it, it gives me errors like the one above.
>
> Anyone have any ideas?  We need to hammer this out quickly or his boss will
> start pushing for NT again.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Robert L. Harris                |   "A person is smart;
> Senior System Engineer          |        People are dumb, panicky
>   R&D Consulting.               \_            dangerous animals"  - Agent K
>
> http://www.rnd-consulting.com/~nomad
>
> DISCLAIMER:
>       These are MY OPINIONS ALONE.  I speak for no-one else.
>
> FYI:
>  perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'

A few days ago I installed a Redhat 6.0 on a virgin 10 Gig Maxtor drive. The
documentation that comes with the drive says that  1. use the supplied "Maxblast"
diskette  and  2. you need a complete windows 95/98 os ( not an upgrade, mind
you!). I supplied the drive parameters (heads, sectors, etc ) manually to the
BIOS and used NORMAL, rather than LBA for the adressing mode. I never used the
Maxblast diskette. Then I did a regular full install of Redhat 6.0, partitioning
with "Disk Druid" without any problem. The system now just works fine.
Although my case is somewhat different from that of your friend; the only thing I
can suggest at this point is that he did use the "Maxblast" diskette. I am not
quite sure what that does exactly, but it seems to trick the system into thinking
that it is dealing with a much smaller drive than it actually is, probably by
lumping a bunch of address into one larger address (LBA: Large Block Adressing).
Not sure whether Linux barfs at LBA or not; worth checking into. Besides, the
boot partition should have fewer than 1024 cylinders; so your friend needs to
chop the drive at least into two pieces. Hope this helps. Cor.