What happens if you forget to create a primary partition?

[Markus Schönhaber]

Alexandra Zaharia:

> 2009/6/3 Markus Schönhaber <ubuntu-users at list-post.mks-mail.de>:

> After I created only the extended one, it stopped showing anything in
> /var/log/messages (and believe me, I was monitoring that all the
> time).

I didn't doubt your words. It may simply happen that an effect you
observe is not due to the cause that seems obvious.
It has happened to me at least three or four times over the years that I
changed something in my network configuration and lost my internet
connectivity. So I did the obvious thing and reverted the change - and
still had no internet access. It then turned out that my provider had
gotten some problem - almost exactly at the moment I fiddeled around
with my network. That sounds extremely unlikely, but as I said, it has
happened to me more than once.
BTW: AFAICT disk errors probably won't be written to /var/log/messages
(on a default Ubuntu installation). Looking at /var/log/syslog would
have been a better choice.

>> Depending on what those "file system creation errors" exactly were, they
>> may already have been symptoms of a drive going faulty.
> 
> Well, first off, this external HDD is brand new, I bought it
> yesterday. It was formatted and partitioned for Mac. Simple, I
> thought. I used fdisk to create 1 single primary partition and I
> assigned it type 83 (Linux).
> 
> When I went on and used mkfs.ext3 to create a file system on it, I got
> near the end:
> 
> ext2fs_mkdir Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short
> read while creating root dir
> 
> I thought it might be something related to ext3 (although I know it
> should be able to handle partitions much larger than 1 TB).
> 
> So I gave it another shot with ReiserFS. The partition was created
> fine (and very fast) but it was locking up when I was writing on the
> drive. (A "mv" operation that was freezing.)

I'd take that as an indication that something's wrong with the drive.
You could skim through /var/log/syslog to see if any errors are logged
at the time you did the above.

>> The first thing I'd do is change the USB cable. If that doesn't improve
>> things, I'd try to connect the drive to another machine. If it's not
>> working there either, I'd contact the vendor for replacement.
> 
> Aye, I have a laptop and a desktop, it's the same on both machines.
> 
> As for the cable, it's the exact type that my photo camera uses so I
> tried that one. Same thing...

I'd take this as another reason to blame the drive.

> I will try to contact their support although I have a feeling they
> won't like me telling them I tried to write a Linux partition table on
> their designed-for-Mac hard drives.

Don't allow them to tell you BS. A hard disk is a hard disk and USB is USB.

-- 
Regards
  mks