# mke2fs hangs on "writing inode tables"

## Supertramp

Hi there. 

I'm about to install gentoo, using the 2005.1 version. but after partitioning my harddrive in a 32 MB boot, 512 swab and ~ 29 GB root partition (everything primary, exactly as described in the gentoo installation documentation) i want to create an ext3 filesystem on /dev/hda3 

but it always hangs on "writing inode tables". The number of the node when it starts hanging is not always the same. mkreiserfs works fine but i'd prefer an ext3 system. 

what the heck is wrong? 

would it help to completely format the harddrive again? 

once it workes fine but i had to re-partition the system :-/

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## frostschutz

 *Supertramp wrote:*   

> but it always hangs on "writing inode tables".

 

Hangs, for how long? It's a bit slow sometimes.

Anything in dmesg when it hangs?

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## Supertramp

Well... for several minutes at least. Then I have to reboot. I even can't kill the process :/

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## Supertramp

Hm, it seems as if there is some broken part around some blocks of the ide... I created an extended partition and filled it with many small logical volumens, using 

```
mke2fs -j
```

 on every of them. 

And: on /dev/hda6 it always freezed the system. Once it freezed during writing inode-tables, some times during creating superblocks and somtetimes during creating the journaling-stuff

atm i use some windows xp revocery cd and it's format function to completely format the drive as even shred used to freeze the system  :Sad: 

or... could it be that some crappy acpi-stuff switches the ide off even if there actually IS acess to my ide? i know there is some function that disables the harddrive after an amount of time without access. perhaps the gentoo-side acess is not noticed? :/

maybe  :Very Happy: 

but i've already tried to boot with gentoo -acpi=off and so on, it still won't work

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## widan

 *Supertramp wrote:*   

> And: on /dev/hda6 it always freezed the system.

 

Likely one (or several) bad sector(s).

 *Supertramp wrote:*   

> atm i use some windows xp revocery cd and it's format function to completely format the drive as even shred used to freeze the system 

 

badblocks should detect a bad sector from Linux without freezing. If there are some, doing a "destructive test" ("-w" with badblocks - and it's only "destructive" to the data, not to the drive !) can clear them (the disk has some spare sectors, but you need to write to the bad sector for it to be reallocated).

 *Supertramp wrote:*   

> or... could it be that some crappy acpi-stuff switches the ide off even if there actually IS acess to my ide? i know there is some function that disables the harddrive after an amount of time without access. perhaps the gentoo-side acess is not noticed? :/

 

ACPI should never do this. Hard disk power management is on the drive itself (yes, there are special commands the OS can send to the drive to tell it to go to sleep after X minutes, but Linux doesn't do that by default).

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