Problem mounting a new SATA hard drive

Anybody? I think I've almost got it, I just don't know why it's saying bad fs type.

flammenwurfer, in QTParted, did you click on the Write icon? If you did not then QTParted will not actually change the partition table and perform the saving/formatting.

Jon

I'm pretty sure I did, but I guess I'll try it again. Hope it works. Thanks.

Ok, do you mean to click Commit? Because I told it to format it as Fat32, then I said to make it active, and it said 3 tasks completed successfully, but it still shows the drive as unknown file type.

I don't think it's actually formatting it when I hit commit. It's a 160 G drive and it says it's done in about 1 second.

Hi flammenwurfer, I'm sorry, yes I meant commit

Actually it can be very fast to perform a format (even faster than Windows). However, there's a little "issue" with QTparted and that is you may actually need to reboot your system in order for it to notice the changes. I'm assuming that you are still testing with the Live CD or have you already perfomed an install to one of your disks?

Also, if the change is not automatically made after reboot, possibly change the line in /etc/fstab (as user root) from:

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 vfat noauto,users,exec 0 0

to

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 vfat defaults,noatime 0 0

But before you do that, as user root, in a konsole, type:
mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
What results do you get for that?

Jon

I have Mepis installed on my other SATA drive, sda3.

Ok, when I format it as Fat32 in QTParted, I hit commit and then restart the computer. Then when I open QTParted it goes back to saying that the drive is an unknown filetype, just like before I formatted it.

Could it have anything to do with the fact that it's an SATA 2 drive? Although my other SATA drive works and I think it's SATA 2 also. Also, I tried formatting it as reiserfs once and when I restarted it recognized it as a reiserfs filetype. So for some reason it just doesn't want to be fat32.

flammenwufer, that's very strange. I don't really have any ideas, but maybe some things to get more info. Is it possible to connect the new drive to a different controller temporarily so that it will come up as sda rather than sdb? Boot up with the Live CD and see what QTParted then has to say about the drive, total size of drive, number of partitions, file system type, and all that stuff.

What I find strange is that you allegedly set up a new partition table (the first thing you had to do), created a new partition of a particular type, formatted it, and rebooted, yet the thing didn't remember?? Very weird

Jon

I agree, it is very weird, but I've done it two or three times. I do have good news though. What I did was cut the drive in half and create two partitions, and now it's working. My only guess is that Mepis or linux in general just doesn't like having drives that big. Either way, it works now. Thanks for all your help!

I don't remember the math on maximum FAT32 sizes. Your solution of splitting the drive to two 80GB drives would make sense. I know I can easily reference a 200GB drive with reiserfs and ext3, so it may be a limitation of FAT32. If you care to experiement more (grin) you could always try a different file system. If you can use the whole drive in that instance then you know that FAT32 is the problem. However, I'm guessing at this point that you're tired of playing around and want to USE THE SPACE to store something

Glad to hear that things are working better! Keep us posted.

Jon

Yes, well I am tired of messing around with it, but I also wanted to use Fat32 so I could read and write to the drive under windows also.

No, flammenwurfer, it's not that the drive is that large, since I have a Mepis machine I'm tinkering with and currently have 2 DVD drives on an IDE channel, and 2 400GB and 2 500GB SATA2 drives installed. All 4 SATA drives are formatted to ext3 and reiserfs (2 of each).

So size really doesn't matter to linux.

Yeah, I didn't think size would be a problem for linux. I think it's FAT32 that has the problem.

I think the limiting factor in your case might be your PC's BIOS.

Just googled "fat32 limit" and I saw stacks of references to a 2Tb limit for fat32. While it's a fairly universal file system, it does suffer from a 2Gb limit for single files and fragmentation issues, so I would give it a miss in favour of a more up to date and efficient fs like ext3fs or reiserfs.

ext2fsd will give you read and write support from within windows. http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/ext2.html If you want a simpler (paid) solution, runtime's captain nemo may be worth a look, though I don't think it has write support.