# New HDD dies after reboot

## npaust

I have a huge database of astronomical images that was outgrowing my 1 TB internal disk, so I just picked up a Seagate ST3000 3TB disk.  I'm having some odd problems though and I wonder if anyone can tell me if I'm doing something wrong or if the disk is broken.

The 3TB drive is an advanced format drive, so I used gparted to create a gpt partion table and a single 2.73 TiB filesystem on the disk.  I've done this twice and used ext3 once and ext4 once.  Using regular parted, I was able to confirm that everything is aligned.

Then comes copying a little bit over 800 GB of data...  and six hours later all of the data is on the new drive.

So far so good.  Now comes the problem.  If I reboot the machine, the new drive won't mount and I get an error of:

 *Quote:*   

> e2fsck /dev/sdc1
> 
> e2fsck 1.42 (29-Nov-2011)
> 
> e2fsck: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks...
> ...

 

I've tried running it using a bunch of different possible superblocks from mke2fs -n.

Anyone have any ideas what I could be doing wrong?

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## mbar

Check dmesg for SATA errors (e.g. caused by somewhat broken SATA cable/controller).

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## Arkhelion

I don't have the option right now ('cause we only have *dows @work) but I think there was a kernel option for "large filesystems" to make it capable of handling 2TB+ filesystems.

Might be completely off-topic though, never read the help page for this menuconfig parameter.

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## npaust

No SATA errors that I can find.  The only interesting hard drive messages from dmesg were

 *Quote:*   

> Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

 

but that appears for all my drives so I don't think it's significant.

The error about the new drive just says

 *Quote:*   

>  EXT4-fs (sdc1): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem

 

I poked around a little bit in the kernel, but didn't see anything specific about large file systems.  I did find kind of a smoking gun though...  I didn't have "Advance partition selection" turned on, so the kernel apparently didn't know anything about GPT tables.  I actually just found a web page that says "make sure you have EFI GUID Partition support turned on.  If you don't, you'll be able to create your partitions, copy data to them, but at restart the partition won't be mountable and the GPT will be corrupted."

Since that's EXACTLY the problem that I'm having, I'm guessing that a fix is only a kernel recompile away.

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## npaust

Worked just like magic.  Apparently I never had the problem before because I was just using dos partition tables since I never needed a partition over 2 TB in size.

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