Maxtor 120GB hard disk formatting
 

I installed a 120GB Maxtor ATA/133 hard drive on my computer running RedHat 8.0, as a primary slave.

I want it to be a backup for my data on the primary master disk, so I will probably need to create only 1 partition on this disk, and format it using the ext2 filesystem. I used "fdisk" to create a partition, but it will only create a 32GB partition, and that too is very hard to format.... I used "mkfs -t ext2 /dev/hdb1", and my computer freezes after some time.

Any suggestions?

Its getting the cylinders, sectors and heads wrong, probably at any rate. Check "dmesg" and see the report of the drive's geometry, it'll look like this:

See if that actually matches your drive's specs, CHS is cylinders, heads, sectors...

Its probably just a legacy BIOS bug, as in your bios is having a stupid attack over the drive. What's the age of the mobo offhand?

Cheers,

Finegan