Strange 2TB HDD behavior

[jgrulich]

I've connected my new NAS 2000GB HDD to the piCore 7.0 and found strange behavior.
I've made two partitions on it, one is 500GB and the second is 1,5TB. Both of them are ext4.
The first one works normally when mounted. HDD activity LED flashes only when some action occurs.
But when I mount the second one, there is some continuous system communication with it.
In top it is listed as "usb-storage" and consumes something about 0.5% of CPU usage.
The HDD activity LED flashes continuously and HDD never goes into the sleep mode.
My question is if there is some system limitation about the HDD capacity, or it's caused by something else.

[Greg Erskine]

hi jgrulich,

I'd be interested in output from "fdisk -ul" and "blkid".

regards
Greg

[jgrulich]

Hi Greg,

The log is attached.

Regards,
Jan

[Juanito]

I thought the limit for an mbr formatted hd was 2tb per partition, but it might be worth formatting the hd with gpt to see if that changes things?

[jgrulich]

I've tried to reduce the size with resize2fs down to 470GB and it works, than I've increased it to 980GB and it doesn't work again.
The limit is somewhere between, but need to recognize the reason.

[jgrulich]

Seems that it's related to the ext4 filesystem. I've used ntfs and everything works fine.

Béla,
is there full version of the ext4 support in the piCore, or is it some light version with some limitations?

[bmarkus]

Seems that it's related to the ext4 filesystem. I've used ntfs and everything works fine.

Béla,
is there full version of the ext4 support in the piCore, or is it some light version with some limitations?

There are no limitations, but you can check the kernel .config file.

[jgrulich]

Than why ext4 is not working? Ntfs is working, but it's read only system.
I need it for NFS use and it's not therefor solution.

[patrikg]

Have you tried to format with another block size ?

[patrikg]

Can't edit my previous post so I add my comment to this instead.
Why not post the output of dumpe2fs to see the difference between the working one and the one that fails.

 
dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda1

[bmarkus]

Did you  check it with fsck?

What is happening when you are formatting it? Is it successful or there are error messages?

Are there messages in dmesg related to the partition?

[jgrulich]

Can't edit my previous post so I add my comment to this instead.
Why not post the output of dumpe2fs to see the difference between the working one and the one that fails.

 
dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda1

The result is attached, don't see any difference.

[jgrulich]

Did you  check it with fsck?

What is happening when you are formatting it? Is it successful or there are error messages?

Are there messages in dmesg related to the partition?

There is no error during formatting and the fsck is fine too.

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tc@RaspiBox:~$ fsck /dev/sda1
fsck 1.42.11 (09-Jul-2014)
e2fsck 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)
/dev/sda1: clean, 11/100409344 files, 6352347/401624992 blocks

tc@RaspiBox:~$ fsck /dev/sda2
fsck 1.42.11 (09-Jul-2014)
e2fsck 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)
/dev/sda2: clean, 11/21692416 files, 1411271/86753008 blocks

and this is mentioned in the dmesg:

Code: (bash) [Select]

[    3.372727] usb 1-1.3.3: new high-speed USB device number 6 using dwc_otg
[    3.514954] usb 1-1.3.3: New USB device found, idVendor=174c, idProduct=55aa
[    3.514998] usb 1-1.3.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1
[    3.515018] usb 1-1.3.3: Product: AS2115
[    3.515037] usb 1-1.3.3: Manufacturer: ASMedia
[    3.515055] usb 1-1.3.3: SerialNumber: 20140324000806
[    3.522081] usb-storage 1-1.3.3:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[    3.533119] usb-storage 1-1.3.3:1.0: Quirks match for vid 174c pid 55aa: 400000
[    3.533915] scsi host0: usb-storage 1-1.3.3:1.0
[    4.533984] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ASMedia  AS2115           0    PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[    4.535862] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 3907029168 512-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1.81 TiB)
[    4.535905] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 4096-byte physical blocks
[    4.537705] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[    4.537756] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00
[    4.538672] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[    8.478350]  sda: sda1 sda2
[    8.485765] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk


[bmarkus]

So partitions looks OK and error free, but mount fails. Which mount are you using? See

Code: [Select]

which mount
command output.

In piCore 7.0 default mount is the utillinux mount

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/bin/mount
BusyBox applet also available as

Code: [Select]

busybox.suid mount
Try each of them explicitely specifying mount command.

[jgrulich]

Now it works. I've used interactive

Code: (bash) [Select]

sudo parted
and percentage division of the disc space to have optimal alignment.
Than I've

Code: (bash) [Select]

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
and

Code: (bash) [Select]

sudo rebuildfstab
Than the regular

Code: (bash) [Select]

mount /mnt/sda1
works fine.

The strange LED flashing was there again, but found that in the

Code: (bash) [Select]

top
is some background root service like [ext4...]
Probably some indexing service which took some hours and now it's no more there and LED flashing disappeared.
This service is probably not run for small discs and therefor not visible.