Hi all,
Using the information provided by hans 1967 I could format my hd and use it on my linux box.
My disc: WD10EARS ( 1tb).
My problem: I/O operations blocking my machine for the most stupid tasks. This behaviour was exponential woring with svn trunks and many little files. Doing a svn cleanup command would take many minutes to finish.
Error logs: None. I could not even find one error in sata controllers or IO read/write errors, so I pointed my efforts on HD formatting.
HD format was initially done using cfdisk and creating parttions in any place and size. Even using 4k blocks ( by default is in 4k), this was not working ok.
Solution:
- run fdisk with the following params:
#fdisk -H 224 -S 56 /dev/sda
- Create partitions.
- NOTE: Use starting cylinders multiples of 4.
- The first partition is usually located at cylinder 63 ( leaving some free mb at disk start ).
As the start cylinder has to be multiple of 4, I had to change it. I preferred to use 64 as start cylinder, didn’t have so much time to test, but 20 would have worked fine. I spent 1 week installing gentoo with this slow disk and reinstalled after the fix 
SO: Start cylinder 64.
-
For partition end cylinder I preferred to specify size and not cylinder using the format +[value]G , of course replace [value] by the size you want.
-
Done. this is my current table ( notice I dont have swap partition hehe, Im just to create one):
#fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
224 heads, 56 sectors/track, 155733 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 12544 * 512 = 6422528 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000ea1b2
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 64 146 520576 83 Linux → notice start cylinder is 64 ( multiple of 4)
/dev/sda2 148 16866 104861568 83 Linux → notice start cylinder is multiple of 4
/dev/sda3 16868 75382 367006080 83 Linux → notice start cylinder is multiple of 4
/dev/sda4 75384 155733 503955200 5 Extended → start cyl is multiple of 4 and covers the rest of the disk
/dev/sda5 75384 92102 104861540 83 Linux → start cyl is multiple of 4 and starts in the same place as the extended partition since its a logical unit.
NOTE: Again, the ending cylinder was chosen by fdisk, since I only specified starting cylinder and size.
Good luck to all the linux community. This problem was really annoying for me and I spent too much hours before discovering the disk was ok, and the kernel modules were also ok.
Thanks to all this forum. Thanks to hans1967 specially, he gave the easiest directives to solve this.
My worst regards to the WD workers who wrote in the harddrive cover:
“For windows installations please align the disk using the utillity. For linux users: IS READY TO USE AS IS” WTF??
Regards,
Gaspar
