>
> Can anyone please help me ?!
>
> Hello,
>
> I was wondering if anyone knows if Linux currently supports the Ultra DMA
> hard drives. I recently bought a SAMSUNG 3.4 GB Ultra DMA hard drive and I
> created 3 partitions using DOS FDISK, formatted all of them and everything
> was perfect. No errors, no bad sectors.
>
> The first partition I left it for DOS, the second partition I made it
> "linux swap" (about 32MB) and the third one "linux native". I installed
> slackware 3.3 and at some point I got a lot of error messages like
> "Address mark not found", "Uncorrectable error"... etc. Very weird.
> I went back to DOS and tried to format that particular partition with
> FORMAT and this time I got about 8K in bad sectors.
>
> Since I figured out that probably it was a bad hard drive (not likely
> though because at the first format I got no errors) I took it back and
> exchanged it with another one of the same type. I repeated the same
> procedure and especially formated it first using DOS and ran SCANDISK with
> surface scan and got no errors, then I tried installing linux one more
> time and at the point when it was trying to make the swap partition with
> "mkswap" i got the same error messages. I went back to DOS once again to
> format the partition and I got about 6K of bad sectors again.
>
> Can anyone explain this thing to me ? Could it be possible that linux
> would damage the dard drive ?!
>
> On the DOS partition I installed Win95 and everything was ok... I
> checked it and there were no errors. The bad sectors always appeared on
> the linux partitions!
>
> All though it is possible that the second hard drive to be bad as well,
> it is very less likely since first time when formatted and checked with
> SCANDISK no errors were reported.
>
> I don't have the slightest idea what is going on or what to do.
> If anyone could give me an advice or an explanation I would really
> appreciate that. (Oh, forgot to mention that the motherboard has an Intel
> 430TX chipset that supports the UDMA hard drives, so the problem could not
> come from the motherboard). The computer is an Intel Pentium 233MMX with
> 32 MB SDRAM if that helps.
>
> Please help me!
>
> Thanks a lot in advance.
>
> Boris Capitanu
> boris@oakton.edu
>
>
Some thoughts come to mind:
DOS can misinterpret the blocks on the Linux partition as bad blocks,
from what I have heard in the past.
Your Linux swap partition should not be any larger than 16 MB. You can set
up two swap partitions for Linux, or more if you feel you will need them.
I think the limit is 8 swap partitions.
With a 3.4 GB drive, you really should divide your partitions into
smaller sections. You will want approximately no more than 850 MB per
partition. For example, you could divide it up as thus:
1st 850 MB partition DOS Primary
2nd 850 MB partition DOS Primary
3rd 16 MB partition Linux Swap
4th 16 MB partition Linux Swap
5th 850 MB partition Linux Native
6th 818 MB partition Linux Native
The idea here is to optimize your disk space. If you have partitions
larger than 850 MB your disk space can be progressively waisted in the
upper drive blocks.
Another thing I would check, is to make doubly sure that fdisk in Linux
agrees with FDISK.EXE in DOS.
Hope this helps.
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Tim Hawes
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