Re: Drive formatting problems

[Allan Nelson <anelson jump net>]

On Thu, 10 Sep 1998, Steve Hazelett wrote:
>Hello,
>   I recently installed 5.1 on a system at work, all is well.  Today we
>added an additional 1.2G HD identical to the first one.  After removing that
>nasty DOS partition we made the new disk (hdb1), using fdisk, into a Linux
>native partition, wrote the partition out to the drive, then ran mkfs on the
>new drive.  We make the hdb1 drive one entire primary partition with fdisk. 
>After running mkfs on the drive and mounting it, df shows only 966M
>available.  I also forced mkfs to check the drive during the run and I saw
>no
>bad block.  No matter what we do, we cannot get this drive to format to
>1.2G.
>   This drive was working just fine on another system.  It is a IDE drive
>and running as a slave.  Does anyone have any suggestions what to look for?
>Thanks.

It is very possible that you are running into the fact that a meg is not really
a meg in most drive specifications and a gig is not really a gig.  I.E. a real
megabyte is 1024 * 1024, in hard drive specs it's usually just 1000 * 1000,
similarly for gigabyte definitions.  You will also lose some space to the
e2fs overhead.  

Another possibility of course is that you have the wrong sectors, tracks, and
cylinders parameters wrong in your CMOS.

 --
Allan L. Nelson			
UNIX System Administrator
Oracle DBA