ok, I must be a complete gimp.
I'm trying to reinstall my Western digital 200GB hard drive. It got screwed up after a power failure.
I'm using slackware 9.1
I use
# fdisk /dev/hdb
to set up my partitions (one HUGE partition)
then I use
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb1
then
# mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /Silo
and I get an error
# mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb1, or too many mounted file systems

Is their anything else I have to run in order to set up a new filesystem?

I actually want to use this hard drive for mass storage. But I tried to install slackware on it to see if the installation program could do a better job at setting up the drive. and it told me that I had a fat32 partition on the hard drive somewhere. However I didn't see it in fdisk. What's going on there?

Hi!
I don't know if it helps but, Did you try to do
"mount /dev/hdb1 /Silo" or "mount /dev/hdb -t auto"?
I don't have your distribution but in the man page of the version of mount I have, I don't see the ext3 option...
Regards

If fdisk seems to not be doing its job, you could always use some third party software. I just use partition magic to prepare all of my drives, it supports ext3 without any problems.

Does anybody know if this problem could be because his partition is too big?

-LBB

I don't know if the size has anything to do. After all Fat32 shouldn't be working with disks over 100 gig and so far my 120 gig with mp3's are working just fine.

BTW the command is

mount -t auto /dev/hdb /whereveryouwantit

LinuxBlackBox: I agree. Fdisk for Linux is better than the version you get from M$ and i prefer partition Magic too
Reformat, resize and convert filesystem. Life's so much better with that program.

I always use this

Make sure you have a directory called windows in the /mnt directory. If not try this

Help any?

I have seen odd problems encountered when repartitioning a disk disappear when I zero out the MBR.
As long as there is nothing on the disk you still want to recover, you can:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/yourharddrive bs=512
That writes all zeros to your MBR. Then repartition and format.
Don't know if it will work in your case but if nothing else does....
Good Luck

You could try -t ext2 on the off chance.

Just a thought, did you create directory /Silo ? prior to trying to mount it?

thanks for all the suggestions, class has consumed me the bast few day so I haven't been able to try anything yet. I will keep you up to date on what happens.

Ok, I think I figured it out!
But I now need some advice on how to proceed.
I wanted to partition the WHOLE THING as one chunk. Ext2/Ext3 doesn't seem to handle this very well because when I make the partition 100GB I have no problem mounting. but when I make a 150GB partition and put a ext3 fs on it, it wont let me mount it.
I still want to partition the HD as one huge thing because I plan on putting very large files on it and I don't want to run into the situation where I have x amount of space on one partition and y amount of space on another partition and the file will only fit if I have x+y amount of space (Did that make since?).

At any rate. I want to know what my options are to partition the drive as one monstrosity!

Don't really know.
I got 2 disks on 120 gig that's formatted in FAT32 with PartitionMagic. That's 'cause i'm running dualboot and want access to my mp3's and movies from both os'es.
To me that works painfree, at least so far.

What if you skip ext3 and just uses ext2?
(is just guessing here)

I have been using ext3 and ext2 interchangeably. And from what I understand about ext 2 or 3 they are very similar. the only difference it ext3 does journalizing stuff.

Ok.. I'm still on ext2

But if there's a limit to how large diskpartition you can have. Even if i vcan't understand why it should be one. would it be so bad to split it in two?
If you'r just going to have movies or cd-images on it, i can understand that you want a large enough disk. I think i got maybe 2 gigs free on my mp3 disk, and i want MORE space too....

I'm currently at the lookout for an extra IDE controller for my box 'cause i'm tiered of swapping the cd-recorder and the dvd-rom all the time.

Current specs for filesystems seem to show there is no poblem with a 200 G drive.
If your mount specifications are correct I do not find other mount options that would apply.
Possibly a BIOS problem?
Remember, cutting edge hardware (which large drives belongs in) can be a bitch.