On Sun, 20 Oct 2002, Steven Raymond wrote:
> I tried /sbin/mke2fs /dev/sda1 and it runs for awhile, gets to the part
> about making inodes and hangs at about 577/1024. Thought I wasn't
> patient enough so I let it run overnight and it didn't get any further
> (fdisk was still "hung").
You might be running into problems with the USB bus itself. You didn't say
whether or not you were running USB 2.0 or not. If you're using USB 1.x,
you're in for a very painful ride. Get an adaptor card (~30 dollars or so)
so that you can get the full bandwidth from your 2.0 device.
That said, I'm running a similar setup and have encountered a few bugaboos
with USB. Firstly, I occasionally get "uninterruptable sleeps" on some of
my USB devices. In most cases, it requires a hard reset of the system,
since at this point the USB drivers cannot relinquish the resources.
Secondly, I'm running a Maxtor 120GB external, and I only get about 11
MB/s throughput on tests, and even less in real-world usage. Granted, it's
only a 5400 rpm drive, but I really expected better throughput on a USB
2.0 link. My guess is that the SCSI emulation makes the whole USB thing a
little I/O bound--if anyone knows how to fix that, I'd sure appreciate
knowing about it.
Thirdly, Red Hat up to (and including) 8.0 can't seem to unmount the drive
cleanly during powerdown. I'm not sure what it's blocking on, but whenever
I change to runlevel 6, the system eventually cuts power to the drive
after repeated dismount failures. Since I'm running a journaling
filesystem, this isn't a catastrophy, but it still seems rather odd that
it happens so consistently.
And lastly, on my 120GB drive, it took FOREVER to format the drive with
ext3 under USB 1.1 (which I did before I got the adaptor card). I found
that ReiserFS performed better in this regard, because it doesn't need to
pre-allocate all those inodes. You may want to at least give ReiserFS a
shot, and see if that's part of your issue too.
--
"The only thing that helps me maintain my slender grip on reality is the
friendship I share with my collection of singing potatoes."
- Holly, JMC Vessel *Red Dwarf*
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