initially, i tried to format a western digital 250 gig drive in debian, but was unable to format it beyond what seems to be the 127gig barrier, so i moved it over and formatted on ext2 filesystem with my windows pc with partition magic. I brought it back over, and it seemed to be working fine, until i got to what seems to be 127 gigs of data on the drive, now i am getting weird errors when i try to write on the drive, either drive is read only, or drive is out of space. the free space however reads that there is still over 100 gigs of freespace on the drive. it is on a ata controller card, that does detect it at its real size, so the problem im assuming is with some aspect of debian or linux, it is currenty installed with the bf24 option selected of the cd, so i believe that would be 2.4.20. any help on this issue, would be much appreciated.

I use reiserfs for large disks. Performs better than ext3. Give that a try.