I have an ASUS P2B motherboard and a new 40GB Maxtor IDE hard disk. I have applied the latest BIOS update to allow recognition of a >32GB hard disk. Fdisk sucessfully creates a ~40GB primary partition (#1). Mke2fs successfully creates a filesystem with 4096-byte block size. The file system successfully mounts. However, I've attempted several times to use 'find ... | cpio -pvd ...' to transfer a 20GB+ directory structure to this filesystem without success. Each time cpio fails afer hours of copying, complaining about lack of space, even though df reports there is plenty of disk space and inodes. At this point the filesystems seems to have been trashed. Directories that were created at the root are gone and files that should be buried deep in the directory structure are at the root of the filesystem. I'm using freshly installed, unpatched RH 6.0 (upgraded from RH 5.1). The new disk is at /dev/hda, though the system is configured to boot from /dev/sda.
Can you try the following alternative way of transferring the files, and advise whether that works? Q> OLDPATH='Path to root of old tree' Q> NEWPATH='Path to root for new tree' Q> pushd $OLDPATH Q> tar cf - * | ( cd $NEWPATH ; tar xvf - ) Q> popd Make sure that $NEWPATH is not inside $OLDPATH as otherwise you have a nice case of infinite recursion there...
The error differs, but the results are the same for tar. After several hours of processing tar begins reporting "tar: ...: Could not create file: No such file or directory" for each file. Df reports that there is free space still remaining. As before, listing the root directory of the filesystem shows files that should be deep in the directory structure to be at the root, directories that were created earlier by tar are now gone. I have another 40GB filesystem on this machine that I've not had problems with over the last year. Every month I refresh that filesystem with about 20GB of data from a tape sent to me by one of my customers. That filesystem is on a DPT SCSI RAID array. So the bug must be with IDE support for this hard drive. I've seen posts in the linux.redhat.misc newsgroup from others having problems with large Maxtor IDE drives. Therefore I'm going to close this bug and post a new one for IDE.