mkfs.ext3 on 500GB drive

[Horst von Brand]

Justin Conover <justin.conover at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/26/05, Rudi Chiarito <nutello at sweetness.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 25, 2005 at 11:00:18PM -0500, Justin Conover wrote:
> > > Well, I think your right, I plugged it into my wifes windows box and
> > > ntfs failed to format it too, guess I'll be calling LaCie. I thought
> > > these were supposed to be good drives.....

[...]

> > Did you notice when Windows actually complained about the drive? I seem
> > to remember that, when I tried to help him, formatting proceeded fine
> > up to 50%, after which it slowed down and then failed. This made me think
> > that there were two 250GB drives inside (the case is larger than the
> > smaller drives, too), that the second drive was faulty and that the
> > USB2/FW firmware wasn't handling the error in the best way. Now, based
> > on his reports as well as yours, I am starting to believe that it might
> > not be a drive failure, but something more fundamental...

> > Can you try creating a partition that takes up the first 49% of the
> > disk?

> My guess is it would be 2 at 250 in a raid 0, I would pop it open, but I
> want to send it back :)  If my raid 0 guess is correct, it wouldn't
> matter doing a % since it will pull from both.

I don't think so. The most expensive part of a disk is the head assembly
and such (witness the prices for different sized disks of similar make and
performance), putting in two makes no sense. It is probably just larger
platters (thus larger casing).

About the trouble they are giving, I'd suspect some limit on disk size
somewhere (not exactly unheard of...). Missing "special Windows driver" or
something?
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
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