mkfs.ext3 on 500GB drive

[Rudi Chiarito]

On Sat, Jun 25, 2005 at 11:00:18PM -0500, Justin Conover wrote:
> Well, I think your right, I plugged it into my wifes windows box and
> ntfs failed to format it too, guess I'll be calling LaCie. I thought
> these were supposed to be good drives.....

Ha-ha, this rings a bell. A colleague of mine had been having problems
weeks ago with a 500GB LaCie on Windows. I think he tried another 500GB
drive the past week and it still exhibited problems. He went back to
a smaller LaCie drive, as those had worked smoothly in the past. As far
as I recall, this happened with both Firewire and USB2.

Did you notice when Windows actually complained about the drive? I seem
to remember that, when I tried to help him, formatting proceeded fine
up to 50%, after which it slowed down and then failed. This made me think
that there were two 250GB drives inside (the case is larger than the
smaller drives, too), that the second drive was faulty and that the
USB2/FW firmware wasn't handling the error in the best way. Now, based
on his reports as well as yours, I am starting to believe that it might
not be a drive failure, but something more fundamental...

Can you try creating a partition that takes up the first 49% of the
disk?

-- 
Rudi