large disks in old machines

Rob Shugg rshugg at ausport.gov.au
Mon Aug 26 12:04:27 EST 2002


Hey
I am setting up some file servers on old P2's and have come across some
problems.

the disk is a Seagate Barracuda 80G.
initially i had no joy on the pentium 2 so I put it in my newer P3 and it
detected ok. I then tried fdisk but it complained about the partition table
being missing. I had to use sfdisk to write a partition table and I had to
manually set the C,H,S values as the kernel had got it wrong. I then made a
reiserfs and mounted it ok.

I then tried to copy about 20G over to it. I got a few IDE timeouts and CRC
errors doing this. So then I put it on an 80 wire ide cable, made a new fs
and repeated the copy with no errors.

That was on a Mandrake 8.1 box. the fileserver is Debian woody, I wanted to
mount this disk on /home in that box.
I had to put the "limit drive capacity to 30G" jumper in in order to get the
bios to detect it. that was fine. The trouble is it wont mount the
filesystem.
I get page full of errors ending in something like "bad filesystem" This box
supports reiserfs. I thought this might be a version problem for reiserfs
between the debian and MDK systems. 

I then tried to create a ext3 fs on the debian box but this produced a stack
of CRC errors and IDE resets. These errors looked similar to ones that were
fixed with the 80 wire cable so I thought i would try that. This was not
possible because the cable I have has 39 pins (one blank for orientation)
and my motherboard has the full 40 pins.

Questions:
has anyone else experienced this or do I have a dud disk?
do i need to put a PCI IDE card in the P2 to support the new disk?
do all 80 wire cables have 39 pins?

rob

PS I read some stuff that reiserfs is still a bit immature. is this the
case?


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