[NBLUG/talk] HDD problems

[Robert Hayes]

I've tried several variations of partitioning and file system specs, and I 
find that with multiple partitions, regardless of the size, each partition 
reserves about 300 MB, even on an ext2 non-journaling fs.

Any direction or clues, folks?

TIA
Robert

On Sunday 21 November 2004 04:37 pm, Robert Hayes wrote:
> I've just moved a spare HDD from an older machine to a newer one.
> I had some trouble mounting it, as per earlier posts.
>
> Now I've emptied the drive of important data, and have mkfs'd an ext3
> partition on it. Still having problems that I can't unravel, tho:
>
> The drive is a Maxtor 10GB 5400 RPM unit that was factory issue with my
> Dell 800 MHz machine a few years ago. It's now in my 2.2 GHz desktop. The
> OS is Debian 3.0.
>
> The current machine bios sees the drive as the secondary slave.
>
> When I ran cfdisk and made the drive one partition, 10GB, Type 83,
> everything was fine. Then I ran cfdisk again to check the settings, and
> received the following:
>
> No partition table or unknown signature on partition table
> Do you wish to start with a zero table [y/N] ?
>
> If I run fdisk, this results:
>
> Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF
> disklabel
> Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
> until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
> content won't be recoverable.
>
> The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 1215.
> There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
> and could in certain setups cause problems with:
> 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
> 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
>    (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
> Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by
> w(rite)
>
> I'm able to mount the drive manually, but of the 10GB it only reveals
> 8.67GB claiming 33MB are used!
>
> Also, everything going to or from the drive is very slow. The cpu cranks up
> to 100%, and file copy or move operations stall. They eventually finish,
> but it is unacceptable.
>
> I've tweaked with hdparm and that yields the following. Turning on dma
> makes no difference on the speeds.
>
> /dev/hdd:
>  multcount    = 16 (on)
>  IO_support   =  3 (32-bit w/sync)
>  unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
>  using_dma    =  0 (off)
>  keepsettings =  1 (on)
>  readonly     =  0 (off)
>  readahead    =  8 (on)
>  geometry     = 1215/255/63, sectors = 10000000000, start = 0
>
> /dev/hdd:
>  Timing cached reads:   1272 MB in  2.00 seconds = 636.00 MB/sec
>  Timing buffered disk reads:   14 MB in  3.06 seconds =   4.58 MB/sec
>
> The 30GB/7200RPM drive in this machine has the same cached read rates, but
> the buffered reads are ten times faster: ~45.8MB/sec.
>
> fdisk -l /dev/hdd results:
>
> Disk /dev/hdd: 10.0 GB, 10000000000 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1215 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
>
> Disk /dev/hdd doesn't contain a valid partition table
>
> I've also gone through and done a mkfs.ext with the -c -c options to
> write/read check for bad blocks. It seems to be clean.
>
> Any ideas, folks?
>
> I'm either very thick or very stumped.
> Or a thick stump.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Robert
>
>
>
>
>
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