[ale] Slow formating of md0;

[Christopher Fowler]

I'm testing a new CD for loading our servers and have ran into an
interesting problem where it seems to take much too long to format the
file system.

When i was doing this using FC2, I could do these procedures in about 15
minutes.  The rebuild of md0 seems to take 2 hours.  In fact many times
I do not even allow it to complete.  I ship it as it and when it
installs the raid is rebuilt.

The problem I see is that mke2fs seems to take FOREVER.  Even the
extraction of the tarball took 20 minutes.  Now the tarball is only 400
meg and the root file system only takes up about 1.3GB of 250GB.  Not
much.


19:11:50 SAM System Flashing utility version 1.0
19:11:50 Do you wish to continue? [no]: yes
19:11:52 Image to be written to the root
[/data/SAM-CentOS5-RC1.tar.bz2]: 
19:11:53 
19:11:53 Starting flashing procedure
19:11:53 Stopping any operational RAIDs
19:11:53 Partitioning first hard drive
19:11:59 Partitioning second hard drive
19:12:05 Creating SWAP RAID.  This is the swap space.
SWAP Raid: 99%   00:09:30
19:21:37 Creating SWAP space.
19:21:38 Turning SWAP on.
19:21:38 Creating System RAID.  This is the root filesystem.
19:21:38 Formatting root filesystem as ext2.

[attached]
19:58:59 Mounting root filesystem.
19:59:08 Restoring root filesystem image.  This may take some time....
20:19:08 Unmounting root filesystem.
20:19:15 The filesystem has been restored.
20:19:15 Flash time took: 4042(s)
20:19:15 Now monitoring the rebuild status.  Press CTRL-C at any time to
stop.

The "flash" procedure ended at 20:19 and has been saying 5 percent  and
it is now 22:21.  Sitting at 5% for over 2 hours.

Kernel output is telling me nothing so I'm not sure what could be going
on here to create this slowness

Does anyone know what could be going on?

Chris