From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.7 [en] (Win98; I) Description of problem: When I choose Disk Druid's option to check /dev/hda5 (/) for bad blocks when formatting, the actual format freezes about 90 seconds into it. I am unable to use Ctrl-Alt-Del or kill the X server. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Choose Disk Druid (Manual Format) 2. Format /boot (/dev/hda1, 54 MB), / (/dev/hda5, 9611 MB), and swap (/dev/hda6, 168 MB) 3. Set "Check for bad blocks" flag. 4. Go through the rest of the steps (any options, doesn't matter). Actual Results: When the disk begins to format, about 90 seconds into the format, the system freezes. The progress bar does not move, the X server cannot be killed, and the machine cannot be rebooted with the keyboard. Expected Results: The format should complete and bad blocks, if any, should be indicated in the proper place. Additional info: I am almost certain that bad blocks exist on my disk. When I tried to perform an upgrade, glibc-common, which I believe was located in the same place on the disk, failed to install because it could not remove a file. Also, I am using the installer on the RedHat 7.1 Update CD.
How long did you let the machine sit? Checking for bad blocks takes a looooong time...two or three hours is not unusual for large drives.
I let it sit quite a while (an additional 30 minutes or so), but the disk activity light had gone off after only 90 seconds and the mouse would not move. I realize the badblocks check takes a long time; I did it on a debian system and it took over an hour with e2fsprogs 1.19, and found 12 bad blocks. It was still unable to install after that.
I took the computer in and it appears it is a hardware problem with a bad K6-2. That explains a lot. I'm filing a NOTABUG on this, if that's OK.
Ok. Too bad about your computer though. There's nothing more frustrating than bad hardware...especially when you're not sure if it's the software or the hardware that has a problem. I wish that when hardware breaks, it would break completely instead of just behaving strangely.