Maxtor 120GB hard disk formatting

lichad · 08-31-2003, 06:46 PM

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?

finegan · 08-31-2003, 07:14 PM

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:

Code:

hdb: 120060864 sectors (61471 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=7473/255/63, UDMA(66)

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