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Having trouble installing a piece of hardware? Want to know if that peripheral is compatible with Linux?

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Old 01-15-2005, 05:11 PM   #1
Schopenhauer101
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Registered: Feb 2004
Distribution: Knoppix
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External hd keeps getting erased.


This mystery has unfortunally been happening way too many times now. Ive lost around 140 gigs of data tree times by now. The drive is a maxtor onetouch with 160 gigs. I use it on a dual boot system with xp and debian/knoppix. It has always been in one partition, fat32. After been using it in xp or when entering xp or sometimes in linux the disk becomes inaccesible. The last time it got destroyed it was during a unwished diskcheck at windows reboot. That time is was unrepairable. I used a recovering software called Get Data Back. And managed to save 30%. In windows it usually defines the filesys as "raw" when this shit happens to me, and then it asks me if i want to format it.

Im thinking if it has to do with the partition being too big for my computer/ or the operative systems, to handle without trouble.
Maybe it has to do with fat32 not beeing a jornaling system, being handled in a slightly different way in linux and xp, and that it creates some kind of conflict on such a big partition. My idea is to split it into 2 partitions. One ntfs and one ext3.

Why is this happening? Is there a good way to erase or wipe the entire hd before partitioning/formating in linux? Can there be filth left at the mbr and partitiontable that i have been having trouble with earlier? Can i clean it with dd if in some way or with fdisk? How? Or is it good enough just to make the two partitions in qtparted and than pray?

Any help whould be great. Is this problem happening someone else with a large external hd?

Take care/
Björn
 
Old 01-15-2005, 06:23 PM   #2
jailbait
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Registered: Feb 2003
Location: Virginia, USA
Distribution: Debian 12
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"Can there be filth left at the mbr and partitiontable that i have been having trouble with earlier?"

You could be having intermittent hardware errors with a bad spot on the hard drive.

"Is there a good way to erase or wipe the entire hd before partitioning/formating in linux?"

The hard drive manufacturers all give away a DOS floppy with hard drive utilities. You should download the relevent floppy image and use it to low level format the bad hard drive. A low level format checks for bad blocks and assigns any bad blocks to a spare block. When you finish a low level format your hard drive should be error free. Then partition the hard drive and format the partitions.


--------------------------------------
Steve Stites
 
  


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