A 2 terabyte Drive Kills Booting.

[Linux for blind general discussion]

I haven't dealt with drives that large yet but was told anything above 1tb
had to be formatted with raid.  If you already did that, this won't help.



Jude <jdashiel at panix dot com> "There are four boxes to be used in
defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)

.

On Wed, 28 Dec 2022, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:

> Last Spring, I bought a 2 terabyte Samsung drive for backing up a
> system running debian buster.  It's a great drive for running
> rsnapshot and it mounts and unmounts lightning fast.  I have
> things setup so that the drive is plugged in to a usb port all
> the time but my backup script mounts the file system just after
> Midnight for backups.  Unless I want something off of the drive
> such as the time I accidentally deleted a bunch of email archives,
> the drive is un mounted but it's device node, of course, still
> sits in /dev.
>
> 	The backup script mounts  it's UUID on
> /var/cache/rsnapshot, takes a new backup and then umounts and all
> that works fine.
>
> 	I have set grub to use a serial console and /dev/ttyS0 is
> the port for that and I am getting good communication between it
> and a Raspberry Pi so one can tell what grub is doing when it
> boots up.
>
> 	There is a problem, however, and I wasn't sure exactly
> what was causing it because this system is on pretty much 24/7 so
> it may go for weeks between reboots.
>
> 	If I reboot it with the backup drive plugged in to a usb
> port, it hangs forever just after grub reports that it is loading
> the kernel.
>
> 	The only way to regain control is to have a keyboard
> plugged in and type Ctrl-Alt-Del or press and hold the power
> button for a few seconds.
>
> 	When the boot process starts, I unplug the 2 terabyte
> drive and get all the same messages via grub except that this
> time it reboots completely and one can log in, do work, etc.
>
> 	If you plug the 2-terabyte drive back in after bootup, it
> quickly registers itself and is ready to be mounted if one so
> desires.
>
> 	So the upshot of all this is that the system works
> properly and the backups happen each night but if there ever was
> a problem and the system rebooted, one would be up the creek
> because the system seems to refuse to boot if that drive is
> mounted.
>
> 	If I halt grub and start the grub command shell, I can
> list all the devices which are listed slightly differently in
> grub so the drive that is normally /dev/sda is listed as hd0.
> Another drive on that system is a 512-MB drive that holds the
> /home file system.  One can do a ls command in grub and the boot
> drive which in unix is /dev/sda now is listed as hd0 with
> partitions of hd0:1 and hd0:5
>
> 	The /home drive is hd1 with hd1:1 as the /home partition.
>
> 	The 2 terabyte drive shows up as hd2 with hd2:1 as the
> whole drive where the backups go.
>
> 	All 3 drives show up in grub's ls command and the backup
> drive passes fsck with flying colors.
>
> 	The backup drive is not bootable and there is only one
> big partition for it.
>
> 	I also set grub to pass the UUID of the root partition to
> the kernel.  It works fine with that setup or just using the
> device name.
>
> 	Does this situation sound familiar to anybody and were you
> able to fix it?
>
> 	This could be a lot worse such as not working at all, but
> right now, a live person has to make sure the 2 terabyte drive is
> unplugged until booting is finished and then it's safe to plug it
> back in.
>
> 	Thanks for any and all suggestions.
>
> 	Martin McCormick
>
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