Debian Installer - Creating Ext3 file system

[diablo900t]

I'm trying to install Debian on a SATA drive, and creating the file system has been going on for almost 2 hours now, and its only moved 2%. There is very little activity from the HDD LED on the outside of the case. I'm wondering if its safe to reboot the computer at this point. If it keeps up at this rate, it will take 4 days to complete.

I'm installing on my my 2nd Sata drive (i have one drive dedicated for Windows) and the drive i'm installing on has a 15 GB partition that Debian is installing to. The swap file partition took about 10-15 minutes (600+ MBs).

Any ideas? I'd hate to lose all the data on this 200GB drive if I reboot now, but this is pretty ridiculous. I did notice before it took about 5 minutes to load the Linux ATA devices on one of the initial screens.

 

[bersl2]

I wonder if it's using the old SATA driver. Are you accessing the SATA drive/partition through /dev/hd?# or /dev/sd?# ? Furthermore, what are the settings given by hdparm? Check if DMA and 32-bit I/O are on.

 

[diablo900t]

I'm not sure how to even check those settings. I'm mostly worried about if i reboot manually, while I hose my drive?

 

[bersl2]

Since you're only formatting a partition, if you stop that, I'm pretty certain you won't hose anything.

Question: Did you boot off of an installer disk or a hard drive? I don't have a very clear picture of what kind of capabilities you currently have or what kind of a situation you are in.

What command did you issue to format the partition? Or did you use a GUI tool? It still should report to you the name of the partition it's operating on, in the form of /dev/[hs]d[a-z]([1-9]|1[0-6]); or to simplify (since you probably don't understand regular expressions), the partition will be referred to by the name of the device file: it will be in /dev; if it starts with 'h', it's using the IDE subsystem, and if it starts with 's', it's using the SCSI subsystem. The older driver uses the IDE subsystem, while the new drivers use the SCSI subsystem.

 

[diablo900t]

There's some problem with the installer loading the SATA drivers. I did a hard reboot and loaded up System Rescue CD. I manually formatted the partition in Ext3 (took about 5 seconds) and resumed the Debian setup. Now it says that there is no root directory to install to. I'm using a Seagate drive, is there any incompatibility with Debian and Seagata SATA drives?

UPDATE: I got to Debian installing the base packages, but it froze at extracting base files; I don't know what the is going on...

Config
DIsk 1: WD Raptor (Windows Partition)
Disk 2: Seagate 7200.7
Partition 1 - NTFS (Data)
Partition 2 - Ext3 (Linux)
Partition 3 - Swap (Linux)

 

[Nothinman]

Since the rescue CD worked it doesn't sound like a hardware problem, but I still wouldn't rule that out. The second most likely culprit is the SATA controller, but I don't have any SATA devices so I have no idea what chipsets are good and which are bad, the drive itself should be irrelevant.

 

[mechBgon]

You haven't said what motherboard it is, either. If the motherboard has two SATA controllers, as many do, then which one is your drive plugged into?

 

[diablo900t]

I figured it out. It was some mode that the installer was using by default. I had to use

Linux -noapic or something like that, then everything went smooth.

It was some sort of compatibility mode that I turned off.