Can't mkfs a new drive

[Ed Wilts]

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 04:41:03PM -0700, Dave Martini 1 wrote:
> I installed a new 160gig drive into my DELL running RHEL 3.
> I went into the setup utility/bios and enabled drive 2.
> I have 4 partitions on the sda boot drive.
> I did an fdisk and created 1 extended partition using the entire drive.

You should not create an extended partition - it should be a primary
partition because you're on a fresh drive.  You wouldn't be able to use
it in Windows this way either.

> When I run mkfs I get this error
> 
> mke2fs 1.32 (09-Nov-2002)
> mkfs.ext3: No such device or address while trying to determine filesystem size
> [root at host1 root]# fdisk -l  /dev/sdb
> 
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sda1   *         1       127   1020096   83  Linux
> /dev/sda2           128      1019   7164990   83  Linux
> /dev/sda3          1020      1274   2048287+  82  Linux swap
> /dev/sda4          1275     14000 102221595   83  Linux

This is your first clue - all of the data partitions are of type 83.

> [root at host1 root]# fdisk /dev/sdb
> 
> Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160000000000 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19452 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sdb1             1     19332 155284258+   5  Extended

Change this to type 83 and you'll be much happier.

        .../Ed
-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program