Arch Linux

dr0p

Member

From: Seattle, WA, USA

Registered: 2008-06-11

Posts: 120

Partitioning Hang?

Hey everyone, I got my xmas present for myself a little early (a new desktop) and I've been trying to install arch on it for the past hour or so but it keeps hanging on the HDD formatting. The first time through I let it run for ~30min and nothing happened so I rebooted and tried again, and as of now it's been about another 30min and it still only says "Partitioning /dev/sda". While going through the partitioning wizard I chose ext3 for the file system if that matters at all.

Here are the specs for the machine:

AMD Phenom X4 @ 2.3ghz
1TB WD Black
2 x 2GB GSKILL DDR2 @ 1066mhz
ATI Radeon HD 3870

And no, none of the hardware is faulty, I have checked.
Is it just taking a long time because it's partitioning a TB drive or is there something wrong? Thanks a lot.

Last edited by dr0p (2008-12-11 02:23:43)

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lldmer

Member

From: Amsterdam

Registered: 2008-05-17

Posts: 119

Re: Partitioning Hang?

You might want to try partitioning by hand with fdisk or cfdisk, and use the installer for any steps after partitioning (don't forget to mount them, either by hand or in the installer).
If something goes wrong, you might get some more output on what is going wrong.

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dav7

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2008-02-08

Posts: 674

Re: Partitioning Hang?

Partitioning only writes a few sectors to the first few bytes of the disk to create a small table (which actually stores the directory of what files are what sectors on the disk, FYI) so the only reason it would slow down would be that the disk is slow (IDE controller, old disk, etc), which in your case is definitely out of the picture.

So there's something a bit odd going on there.

I'd:

- Play with the various mkfs.<...> versions on the livecd (enter mkfs.<tab><tab> to see which are available, syntax is typically "mkfs.whatever /dev/device") and see what they produce - if you find one that works, use its corresponding entry in the installer. The problem could simply be that the installer is receiving some output from mkfs.ext3 that it doesn't expect, so never triggers that mkfs.ext3 is done and... hangs. The problem could be in mkfs.ext3 itself, though.
- Try other Linux distros, and if they work, note the kernel and mkfs version.
- See if the hard disk passes a basic format/read/write test somewhere else (read: ie, on winfailure), after you've wiped it.
- Take a look at smartctl's view(s) of the disk - I think you'd probably want -x, but there are other options too that might be interesting (like self tests and such).

-dav7

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dr0p

Member

From: Seattle, WA, USA

Registered: 2008-06-11

Posts: 120

Re: Partitioning Hang?

Okay, so I had an extra Xubuntu x64 disk lying around, and tested it and it worked fine installing. As a matter of fact, I'm posting from it now. It used ext3 and the kernel is "Linux ubuntu 2.6.27-7-generic #1 SMP Fri Oct 24 06:40:41 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux". Not exactly sure where this puts me, should I just try formatting it by hand and then skipping that step on the installer?

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dr0p

Member

From: Seattle, WA, USA

Registered: 2008-06-11

Posts: 120

Re: Partitioning Hang?

Okay, so I manually partitioned it and everything was going great, but for some reason GRUB won't install. Here is how I have my partitions laid out, what can I do to make GRUB work?

40mb /dev/sda1 +BOOT +NC
1gb /dev/sda2 SWAP
7gb /dev/sda3 EXT2
<Remaining> /dev/sda4 EXT2

I tried installing GRUB to both /dev/sda and /dev/sda1 both times chosing /dev/sda3 as my root directory, but neither worked. It said to check /dev/tty5 for the log but when I did it was empty. When I boot without a CD it just prints "GRUB" over and over untill my screen fills up. Any ideas why? Thanks again to everyone.

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Dieter@be

Forum Fellow

From: Belgium

Registered: 2006-11-05

Posts: 2,001

Website

Re: Partitioning Hang?

Partitioning only writes a few sectors to the first few bytes of the disk to create a small table (which actually stores the directory of what files are what sectors on the disk, FYI)

I think you're confusing the mbr and the filesystem superblock.
The mbr contains the partition table, which is basically a list of partitions with the numbers of the sectors where they stop and start and a few flags.
The filesystem superblock is where the metadata such as where each file is located, is stored.

Last edited by Dieter@be (2008-12-11 10:23:41)

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dr0p

Member

From: Seattle, WA, USA

Registered: 2008-06-11

Posts: 120

Re: Partitioning Hang?

Sorry to do this, but... bump.

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