Linux partition?

[ojnik]

ok, I bought one for a friend, an A110 a while back and its working great with a WD green 1 TB drive.

then one day she tells me she cant transfer iso files to it via USB like she could before, I confirmed cant remember the error but it cant be done. but it basically gave a permissions error half way through the transfer and stopped it
anyways a few months later I finally take a look at it. run all WD diags on it and it passes fine
player plays all info on the drive fine.
then I ran the firmware update and system update and everything seems fine
then I hook up to USB to my WinXP PC. I cant see the drives, so I install the EXT fat drivers
I can see the first system partition but the other two shows up as LINUX and ask me to format it.
I don't want to format it because there's a ton of data on it
so I decided to transfer the data via network and just wipe it from start...
it takes a whopping 22-30mins PER 4.3gig ISO file on my gigabit switch, now I know the A110 is only 10/100mbit but is this normal? this long per file? I think I can download faster from my giganews account on my 15mbit cable connection...

anyways anyone seen this issue? did I update the software but didn't let it install the other partitions so therefore I cant see the main partition on the drive? because I'm wanting to wipe it now..
is there a quick solution to fix the main partition that is showing up as "linux" on the EXT FAT program
and is the network supposed to be that slow?
any ideas how to fix this or what could be wrong?

[johnpoz]

A110 says its 10/100 sure -- but best I have been able to see with it is ftp about 7 to 8MBps.. Like 65Mbits tops.. just the limitation of the horsepower its got to use.. Nothing you can really do about that - with FTP you can see 7 to 8, with SMB more like 3 to 3.5MBps

with 30mins for a 4.3 I would guess your using SMB -- try ftp its much faster!!

AS to issues with windows seeing the drive.. To be honest I would just boot your fav linux liveCD on your box and directly connect the disk and they you will be able to see whatever you want without having to worry about any ext filesystem type drivers for windows

[ojnik]

there has to be a way to change that 3rd default partition to be EXT not Linux...
anyways ill try FTP when I get home tonite.
thanx

anyone else with an idea?

[BanditRider]

It's likely that the drive is corrupted. (not as bad as it sounds)
When the PCH detects a corrupted drive it marks it as read-only to prevent further corruption. If you leave it alone it should correct itself but it could take several hours for a 1TB drive. Leave it overnight and it my be fine in the morning.

If you're not that patient, you can boot your PC with a Live Linux CD like the GParted Live CD.
Connect the A-110 to the PC via USB and Boot the PC into GParted. Make sure you select the right drive. It's the one with the ext3 partitions. Right click on the large ext3 partition and select Check. This will run fsck on the partition and repair it.

[ojnik]

i've moved the files to another source then i've deleted the partition
and now I can seem to access the drive fine, i''m moving the files back and so far a few 100gigs and its working
what would normally do this or cause this?
the fact that my friend couldnt write files
and when I was trying to FTP a file off of it. it failed at this 1 file. on the same byte count over and over...
i've tried to transfer it to a different spot
the hard drive i've moved it off too is brand new. but i'm using the original hard drive in the popcorn hour.

[BanditRider]

Filesystem corruption happens while writing to the disk. Your friend had it connected to a PC with USB and was copying files to it. The PC buffers writes to the USB. Even when it looks like it's done, this buffer still needs to be flushed and written to the disk. That's why it's important to use "Safely Remove Hardware" to flush that buffer before removing USB devices.
It's likely that your friend didn't do this and that file got corrupted. It's also probably the file you had trouble reading because of the corruption.
If you've re-partitioned and formatted the drive then all is well and you can trust that drive again.