[NBLUG/talk] HDD problems

Robert Hayes rhayes at silcom.com
Tue Nov 23 11:04:47 PST 2004


Yes, it is now. 

I went through the BIOS and set the CHS manually to 19376/16/63 and set the 
BIOS to LBA. 

I'm still having the same problem. 

I don't know if it's related, but when mkfs is running, when it gets to the 
final set of blocks it slows down tremendously and that is when the CPU hits 
100%.

Thank you.


On Tuesday 23 November 2004 10:01 am, Christopher Wagner wrote:
> This may be irrelevant, but what are that BIOS settings for the drive?
> Is it definitely setting it up as LBA?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: talk-bounces at nblug.org [mailto:talk-bounces at nblug.org]On Behalf Of
> Robert Hayes
> Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 10:41 AM
> To: General NBLUG chatter about anything Linux, answers to questions,
> etc.
> Subject: Re: [NBLUG/talk] HDD problems
>
>
> 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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> > talk at nblug.org
> > http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
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