Re: Problem creating filesystem
On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 02:14:08PM +0100, Gaius Mulley wrote:
> I'm interested - as I had a similar experience yesterday. I used the
> SID netinst dated 6 Sept iirc. My experience was:
>
> 250 GB drive - bios occasionally didn't spot it, the netinst SID
> couldn't detect the correct IDE kernel modules to load for the disk.
> I gave up on this disk and moved to:
SATA or IDE 250G?
> 20 GB drive - mkfs ok (but it took ages - maybe I was having dma
> timeout during this, and ide reset messages - I didn't look).
> Later on when installing packages onto the drive I had many ide
> timeouts, dma problems (just like the ones you reported).
> However I also tried installing an older Suse 9.1 (64 bit)
> and it also took ages to mkfs and died during installing packages.
> Eventually I gave up and used another disk:
>
> 10 GB drive - which worked fine.. mkfs, install, later I compiled gcc
> etc etc
Hmm, a 10G disk is likely old enough to be at most UDMA33. It would
work fine with a 40wire ide cable.
> My next test will be to replace the IDE cables with brand new ones
> (the cables came from an older machine which also had the 20 and 10 GB
> drives).
Make sure to use an 80wire ide cable, since the MB supports faster than
UDMA33 and if any drive supports faster than that, it will try to use it
and that only works reliably with an 80wire ide cable. A 20G might be
new enough to do UDMA66.
> The motherboard is the MSI-9131 SSI Mainboard (K8D Master -F)
> using the AMD 8131 chipset.
It could of course be a bug in that chipset or the kernel driver for
that chipset. Or maybe that chipset doesn't agree with certain ide
drives on some timing issue.
> My drives were also jumpered as master on IDE primary and the CDROM
> drive was master on IDE secondary. I only ever had one disk and one
> CDROM drive attached to the motherboard at a time. The CDROM checked
> its image correctly.
No drive should ever operate as slave without a master. That violates
the ide specifications and is not required to work reliably at all.
Sometimes it does, often it does not.
> So my suspicions on my setup are:
>
> (i) possible problem with IDE cable
> (ii) bad luck with 2 disks
>
> however it was interesting to see that SuSE 9.1 also had problems with
> the 20 GB disk and that SID correctly performed a mkfs on the 10 GB
> drive which appears to work fine..
Well suse probably uses the same driver, and the hardware is the same,
so I would expect the same behaviour.
Len Sorensen
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