[NBLUG/talk] HDD problems

[Robert Hayes]

Good grief! It's working.
After your message I went back and checked the drive settings with hdparm.
After the last mkfs attempt I'd neglected to update all the settings. Now it's 
running just as it should.
Thanks for the clue!

/dev/hdd:
 multcount    = 16 (on)
 IO_support   =  1 (32-bit)
 unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
 using_dma    =  1 (on)
 keepsettings =  1 (on)
 readonly     =  0 (off)
 readahead    =  8 (on)
 geometry     = 1215/255/63, sectors = 10000000000, start = 0


On Tuesday 23 November 2004 10:01 am, Christopher Wagner wrote:
> This may be irrelevant, but what are that BIOS settings for the drive?
> Is it definitely setting it up as LBA?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: talk-bounces at nblug.org [mailto:talk-bounces at nblug.org]On Behalf Of
> Robert Hayes
> Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 10:41 AM
> To: General NBLUG chatter about anything Linux, answers to questions,
> etc.
> Subject: Re: [NBLUG/talk] HDD problems
>
>
> I've tried several variations of partitioning and file system specs, and
> I
> find that with multiple partitions, regardless of the size, each
> partition
> reserves about 300 MB, even on an ext2 non-journaling fs.
>
> Any direction or clues, folks?
>
> TIA
> Robert
>
> On Sunday 21 November 2004 04:37 pm, Robert Hayes wrote:
> > I've just moved a spare HDD from an older machine to a newer one.
> > I had some trouble mounting it, as per earlier posts.
> >
> > Now I've emptied the drive of important data, and have mkfs'd an ext3
> > partition on it. Still having problems that I can't unravel, tho:
> >
> > The drive is a Maxtor 10GB 5400 RPM unit that was factory issue with
>
> my
>
> > Dell 800 MHz machine a few years ago. It's now in my 2.2 GHz desktop.
>
> The
>
> > OS is Debian 3.0.
> >
> > The current machine bios sees the drive as the secondary slave.
> >
> > When I ran cfdisk and made the drive one partition, 10GB, Type 83,
> > everything was fine. Then I ran cfdisk again to check the settings,
>
> and
>
> > received the following:
> >
> > No partition table or unknown signature on partition table
> > Do you wish to start with a zero table [y/N] ?
> >
> > If I run fdisk, this results:
> >
> > Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or
>
> OSF
>
> > disklabel
> > Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
> > until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
> > content won't be recoverable.
> >
> > The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 1215.
> > There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
> > and could in certain setups cause problems with:
> > 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
> > 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
> >    (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
> > Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by
> > w(rite)
> >
> > I'm able to mount the drive manually, but of the 10GB it only reveals
> > 8.67GB claiming 33MB are used!
> >
> > Also, everything going to or from the drive is very slow. The cpu
>
> cranks up
>
> > to 100%, and file copy or move operations stall. They eventually
>
> finish,
>
> > but it is unacceptable.
> >
> > I've tweaked with hdparm and that yields the following. Turning on dma
> > makes no difference on the speeds.
> >
> > /dev/hdd:
> >  multcount    = 16 (on)
> >  IO_support   =  3 (32-bit w/sync)
> >  unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
> >  using_dma    =  0 (off)
> >  keepsettings =  1 (on)
> >  readonly     =  0 (off)
> >  readahead    =  8 (on)
> >  geometry     = 1215/255/63, sectors = 10000000000, start = 0
> >
> > /dev/hdd:
> >  Timing cached reads:   1272 MB in  2.00 seconds = 636.00 MB/sec
> >  Timing buffered disk reads:   14 MB in  3.06 seconds =   4.58 MB/sec
> >
> > The 30GB/7200RPM drive in this machine has the same cached read rates,
>
> but
>
> > the buffered reads are ten times faster: ~45.8MB/sec.
> >
> > fdisk -l /dev/hdd results:
> >
> > Disk /dev/hdd: 10.0 GB, 10000000000 bytes
> > 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1215 cylinders
> > Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> >
> > Disk /dev/hdd doesn't contain a valid partition table
> >
> > I've also gone through and done a mkfs.ext with the -c -c options to
> > write/read check for bad blocks. It seems to be clean.
> >
> > Any ideas, folks?
> >
> > I'm either very thick or very stumped.
> > Or a thick stump.
> >
> > Thank you,
> >
> > Robert
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > talk mailing list
> > talk at nblug.org
> > http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
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