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Grogster

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Joined: 31/12/2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 9755

Posted: 06:06am 09 Mar 2021

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Hi.

When I try to format a 3TB drive to ext4, it fails.
I can only slow-format it to 3TB and ext3.
When I try to do an ext4 format, Gparted moans that the drive does not support 64-bit, but I am using a 64-bit Linux, so what the F is going on?

Can anyone help?

The drive was originally used in NASLite-2, which custom formats to ext3, but I am wiping these drives and wanting to reformat them to ext4 under Puppy Linux as I rebuild this machine.

I suspect that NASLite-2 has done some kind of wonky format or something - something that Gparted does not like under Puppy anyway, as I have formatted other brand-new 2TB drives to ext4, but this one is fighting me.

EDIT: Here are the details from Gparted about this 3TB volume:

....so, how can I enable 64-bit support on this volume?
Booting from a Bionic Puppy 64-bit USB drive.
Edited 2021-03-09 16:13 by Grogster

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ajkw
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Joined: 29/06/2011
Location: Australia
Posts: 290

Posted: 07:51am 09 Mar 2021

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Hey Grogster

I found this on a forum so you are seemingly not alone.

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=117075&sid=2eef2d469f20c6aeae1bbe2f5c880676

Perhaps there is some tips in it.

Cheers,
Anthony

Rado
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Joined: 27/11/2020
Location: Croatia
Posts: 59

Posted: 10:54am 09 Mar 2021

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Could you copy-paste all of the mkfs results here? I don't see how it fails (the 64-bit support is a warning, not the actual error message).

How old is that disk? I see it has been used in some NAS function. What you would likely have to do is this:

- completely erase the partition information, create new GPT and new partitions from scratch;
- it would be smart to run a check for bad blocks as well, especially if you get I/O errors: man badblocks

It might be worth the trouble to check SMART data as well - if there are many bad blocks or block reallocations, you might not want to use the drive for anything you can't afford to lose.

Grogster

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Location: New Zealand
Posts: 9755

Posted: 04:26am 10 Mar 2021

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Hi all.

Here is the full report:

I have also now tried creating both an msdos and gpt table on this drive, neither worked.
msdos table caused Gparted to moan that the drive is bigger then the maximum volume size, so it would not let me format ext4 to the msdos table. It did allow me to make a gpt table, but again - as soon as you try to format the drive to ext4, I get the error above.

I wonder if there is a newer version of Gparted?
I will check, cos the version being used is a few years old now...

Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!

Grogster

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Posted: 05:41am 10 Mar 2021

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UPDATE:

I tried formatting to ext3, which is a long slow format, and it almost completes, but then issues the same error.

I now suspect the drive itself.

It is a WD Red 3TB, and I HAVE had these 3TB red's die on me before.
None of the other sizes, just the 3's.

I will replace this drive with a spare one, and see if I can complete an ext4 format.
I get the feeling I will be able to.

Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!

Grogster

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Joined: 31/12/2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 9755

Posted: 06:03am 10 Mar 2021

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Replaced that drive.
Was a 2.5TB WD Green, not a 3TB red.

Just for a test, I plopped a 2TB WD green in there and tried to format that to ext4.
It formatted just fine - no errors.

Kinda proves a point I think. The 2.5TB drive would appear to be crook.

Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!

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