Topic: Problem with Removable USB Drive

[wjhobbs]

All,

I have encountered a challenge that I am hoping you experienced people can help me with.

I successfully tested Darrell May's great new backup2usb facility on 6.0.1-01 (refer to http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=29872.0). I used an ULTRA Mini Portable Disk case (purchased at TigerDirect) and a 300GB Maxtor drive installed and formatted as ext3 (the formatting was done on a Fedora system). It had no problems with the drive. As many of you know, Darrell's contrib uses fstab entries to control mount and unmount operations for backup media.

However, on reboot e2fsck gets called and can't deal with the drive. The boot hangs.

Checking filesystems
fsck.ext3: Filesystem has unsupported feature(s) (/dev/dsa1)
e2fsck: Get a newer version of e2fsck!
                              [FAILED]

The fstab entry looks like this:

/dev/sda1      /media/usbdisk  ext3    defaults        0 1

I have to comment out the fstab entry to get boot to complete -- but the fstab entry is needed for the backup job. The Fedora Legacy site for 7.3 shows the same version of fsck as on this machine.

Any suggestions for getting around this? The backup job has no problem with the drive.

Thanks.

John[/quote]

[CharlieBrady]

Any suggestions for getting around this?

Format the drive on the server itself, not on a Fedora system. Google will probably tell you more about the incompatibility issue - I think it might be selinux related.

[wjhobbs]

Charlie,

Thank you for your suggestion.

It appears that my problem may be more fundamental than that.

Per your suggestion, I attached the drive to the server, deleted and recreated the partitions and then attempted to format the first partition. It got part way through and the entire system froze!! I repeated the process to see if there was something else going on but got the same result. ALL processing on the server ceased.

I can only conclude that there is some fundamental incompatibility between the e2fsprogs package on 6.0.1 and my usb drive. (It would seem not to be a system or driver incompatibility since the backup process works when the drive has been formatted elsewhere.)

Any other ideas?

John

[boss_hog]

Hi yall,
as an added note to wjhobbs post.
I have been trying to get a stable install on my new server, without luck.
CentOS_4.2_Server, Fedora Core 4 and SME 7b9 all exhibit similar behaviour. Hard locks, kernel panics, not synching etc..

I am in the debugging stages right now. However, the one common factor  with my problems and the above "issues" (UPS problem reported to bugzilla and this thread) all point to a USB problem.

My testing:
1) checked both 512mg memory modules (memtest86 says PASS)
2) changed out video cards
3) full and minimalistic install on CentOS and FC4
4) my next test will be to disable USB all together.

Also a test run to install Debian3.1rcX, failed when the installer identified the hiddev (USB ?), computer locked solid.

For those that are interested in the specs:
AMD Sempron 3100+, 1Gb(pc3200) ram, 100gd IDE hdd.

Not so oddly enough, I cannot get my USB attached UPS to work on any of the "Red Hat based" installs.
As more info becomes known I will post back or report a bug to SME 7 bugzilla.
Joe

[mdo]

/dev/sda1 /media/usbdisk ext3 defaults 0 1

I would try:
/dev/sda1 /media/usbdisk ext3 noauto,defaults 0 0

Michael

[wjhobbs]

Michael,

Great work-around. That worked like a charm!

Thanks.

John

[wjhobbs]

Just an update to close the loop.

I tested the drive on SME7pre1 and fsck worked just fine on a drive formatted as ext3 on a Fedora system.

John