So, the hard disk in my webserver appears to be going south. I've turned on SMART monitoring, but nothing obvious appears at this point.

At the same time, I've been running a little short of disk space on that box (nothing spectacular -- there's still about 10Gb free), so I bought a shiny new 200Gb Barracuda to go in the box.

And I'm having trouble formatting it. I can plug it in fine, and I can partition it fine -- I opted for 7Gb root, 500Mb swap, the rest /home. Now, when I try to format /home using mke2fs -j -O sparse_super, it hangs the box solid at the last step -- "writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information".

Any ideas?

This is on Debian/woody, btw, so e2fstools is, like, 1.27 from 2002 or something. Do I just need to format the disk with a newer version of mke2fs?

Oh, and kernel 2.4.26.

Are you sure it's really hanging -- that last step sometimes takes several minutes..

I *always* use the newest e2fstools --> they only ever include bugfixes and forward compatibility updates and the like. One really does want the best version of e2fsck, for example..

Cheers

Well, if your numlock LED isn't responding to you, then do as for the Empeg: go to the console and look at the error messages..

Formatting under Knoppix may or may not work for you -- if (very likely) it uses a newer kernel than Woody, the new kernel may use "new" features when creating the filesystem. Should be fine within 2.4.2x family, though.

-ml

I've had two separate Shuttle machines break. The first one had defective capacitors which leaked everywhere and the second just mysteriously died one day. They might look nice but I'm not convinced about their long term reliability.

I know people that haven't had any problems at all with their Shuttles but the same can be said about HDs and my refusal to use Maxtor ever again. I think the count of Maxtors dying in the year or so is about 11. Not all them were mine either so it's not the enclosure or PSU.

I don't like to comment on the reliability of computer kit as I swear even mentioning it causes machines to become unreliable.

Yeah it certainly looks cheap, but once you add a few options the price soon shoots up. Kinda like the Mac Mini.

£74 for a rack mount kit? Two pieces of bent metal with some holes in? What started out as a £389 server is now £1,197.

If it's just the bay size that's stopping you from getting one, I'm sure you could find something much cheaper and smaller elsewhere. Of course you'd need the incredibly expensive rack adaptor then.... or slip Patrick a tenner to knock you up a pair in 5 minutes.

You can also buy rack strip cheaply from CPC and fashion your own enclosure to your exact requirements, that's what I've done in the past.

You can buy smaller racks and you definitely don't need the Dell one. There is even a wooden one on eBay at the moment.

I actually ran a Dell 1U P4 PowerEdge just lying down for a year with no problems. Not particularly elegant but it did work.

Cris bought one of those from the same guy. Maybe he can give you some more info.

Rack adapter? You mean the rails?

The PowerEdge 1750 that I've got next to me at the moment came with a rack mount rail kit which you bolt in and then just drop the server onto. No clue what the Dell specific version of this looks like however. You could just bolt it in with the ears alone I guess.

I've often made do with a pair of 2-post EIA telco racks lined up. Much less expensive than a cabinet.

And why aren't you using a journaled FS?