Actually, I have had this exact problem with almost the same hardware.
I have 2 K7, 1 with the VIA and 1 with the Irongate chipset. Promise in
each. 4 or 5 of the Maxtor 36GB drives.
The problem isn't with the RAID stuff. (Please don't flame me for this,
'cause I'm not a driver hack.) The problem appears (near as I can tell)
to be a problem in the IDE driver. You can partition the drive into a
36GB partition by entering expert mode and setting the geometry of the
drive to 255/63/4441 (if I remember correctly) but no filesystem will
actually work that includes any partition bigger than 65536*512k (about
32GB.)
To prove it, try this: partition one of your drives with a 36GB
partition, and just make a filesystem on it (no RAID.) It'll make just
fine. Mount it and it will complain that the filesystem isn't checked.
Check it and it'll have errors as you've seen below. Remount it, and
it'll claim its not checked. etc. etc. Then make 2 partitions of under
32GB each, and both will make and check fine on the same drive.
65536 is what, an unsigned int? My guess is someone said somewhere in
the IDE driver "we'll NEVER need to address a partition on an IDE drive
bigger than 32GB" so even though all the tools can handle it, and it all
looks OK, it doesn't actually work.
My fix (works fine) is just to make 2 partitions on each drive of equal
size, and then RAID the partitions together. I've made machines from
about 145GB to well into 200+GB with the 36GB Maxtor drives. The drive
can be bigger than 32GB, and so can the filesystem, just not any single
PARTITION within the filesystem... Did that make sense? Its late...
Jakob Sandgren wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have set upp Softraid with 5*36.5GB (Maxtor) using RAID-5.
> (3 disks on onboard (Athlon) VIA controller, 2 disks on PDC20262)
>
> The setup worked ok and I created a file system with the following
> data:
> Block size: 4096
> Fragment size: 4096
> Blocks per group: 32768
> Fragments per group: 32768
> Inodes per group: 1024
> Inode blocks per group: 32
>
> (128k / inode)
>
> This results in a ~145GB filesystem.
>
> I use the following software:
> 2.2.13
> md driver 0.90.0 MAX_MD_DEVS=256, MAX_REAL=12
> ide patch from Andre Hedrick (~Nov 10)
>
> The PROBLEM:
>
> Running fsck on this filesystem _allways_ reports a _LOT OF_
> errors. Automatic check at bootup never works, I allways have to do a
> manuall check.
> Running fsck -y takes several hours (it restarts several times,
> allways after reporting (and fixing) a lot of errors (100+).
>
> It seems to me as if I have problem with corrupted data.
>
> I would like to try this with the latest 2.2.14pre -kernel + softraid
> + latest ide-patch but the softraid patch does not apply to this.
>
> Anyone who has an idea?
>
> Regards
> /Jakob
>
> PS.
>
> The errors I get from fsck is:
>
> Inode 1049224 is in use, but has dtime set. Fix<y>? yes
>
> Inode 1049224 has imagic flag set. Clear<y>? yes
>
> <<<< repeated xxx times >>>>
>
> Inode 1049389 has illegal block(s). Clear<y>? yes
>
> Illegal block #0 (1403708311) in inode 1049389. CLEARED.
> Illegal block #1 (1142830631) in inode 1049389. CLEARED.
> Illegal block #2 (62958259) in inode 1049389. CLEARED.
> Illegal block #3 (67192161) in inode 1049389. CLEARED.
> Illegal block #4 (716604184) in inode 1049389. CLEARED.
> Illegal block #6 (1862402048) in inode 1049389. CLEARED.
> Illegal block #7 (1288048149) in inode 1049389. CLEARED.
> Illegal block #8 (3056304705) in inode 1049389. CLEARED.
> Illegal block #9 (3648820807) in inode 1049389. CLEARED.
> Illegal block #10 (698222959) in inode 1049389. CLEARED.
> Illegal block #11 (1716902030) in inode 1049389. CLEARED.
> Too many illegal blocks in inode 1049389.
> Clear inode<y>? yes
>
> <<<< repeated xxx times >>>>
> --
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